The rats, known as scummy creatures that bottom-fed through the world of humans, through their trash and filth and disease and greed and madness, they all lived in a world underneath the well of fire and death, Seattle, and in a little world of their own. A world they were perfectly happy with, where there was absolutely no media, no sudden death from insanity, no myths and no rumors, and they were primitive and simple, simply savages who feasted on the flesh of dead skin, on the blood that drained from Seattle, the broken gadgets and machinery that refused to work because their masters gave them no pity and valued nothing in them. The rats simply adopted these orphaned machines, fixed them, and made them their own. No matter how the machine ran, how their metallic organs functioned, what color of their digital light eyes were, they loved them all the same, and they let them into their family, into the rat abode.
Rats were cunning creatures. They knew how to fix human machinery, after living so close to it for so long, and they studied the humans under their careful, black holed eyes that looked as if another rat had chewed into their eye sockets. They picked up any scraps they could collect, as long as the humans no longer cared for it. The humans were gods among the earth, and they had everything, while the rats simply took what they thought of what was nothing and made it into something. They had no qualms about how little they could have. The rats simply made do with what they had, and made the best of it. The best they could do with their pink stubby fingers and toes that looked as if they belonged to a human fetus, which they also knew humans sometimes abandoned as well, and they had no morale at all for it. But looking at their hands, they realized they were a little of the same of the infant gods, and for that they were thankful, as they praised their gods often, and lived much like the Aztecs, by sacrificing the useless and the poor to the ones who could benefit from their meat and their hearts.
The rats feasted on dead flesh, the dead homeless, the rotten food, they ate it all. They made the streets clean, they made Seattle thrive with crime, they made it keep working like clockwork, they kept all the humans right on their toes and they made themselves work with their bare pink baby hands. They built this city for themselves, and they made it thrive with the righteousness of the power of the gods they worshiped, even if they ate the homeless and they ate any other rat who was no longer useful to the system. They thought if a rat could no longer function in society, they gave them to someone else. They injected them with lethal amounts of morphine they would take from the humans chemical labs that their brothers and sisters worked and suffered in, and they ate them, while they dined on chocolate chips to celebrate the passing of his body into their own. Rats didn't believe in spiritual beginnings and ends and spiritual animals and spiritual humans and spiritual creations. They only believed in themselves, and their old traditions passed from rat civilization to rat civilization. They lived among humans for so long that they thought of them no more as pesky friends, a parasite that benefited both bodies.
The rats were sitting in the dark alleys of their precious metallic city, with their cups full of melted chocolate chips, singing and cajoling along as it was a holiday among the rats on this very special day, the holiday in which a great rat leader was born, named Leader Mattias, and he discovered the very simple science that was in every mind of the rats today: if you collected various wires from the humans and had a volunteer to run in the Wheel of Power, it conducted electricity, and the rats loved to celebrate things that made their city come to order. Their love for it was brindled with ecstasy and excitement, and their minds buzzed and swirled and snapped and crackled as as they used the drugs from the humans' science labs to make their lives so much better, the meth and the cocaine and the pills that eased their little pithy sorrows and the pills that made them forget everything once they could swallow it down into their empty sacks of stomachs. Instantly when the pill came into effect, everything seemed to burst into color, as the blues blasted along with the greens, the reds bled along with the yellows, everything more vivid and more vibrant than the usual steel blue and gray that gathered in the city's corridors and among their own long, lengthy shadows with blades as teeth.
But nothing was so simple for the rats. Their minds belonged to asylums once they smelled the nice, distinct smell of rat gas, and rat poison, the fresh purple liquor that many rats mistake as their most coveted drink besides melted chocolate chips, grape juice. Even if the rats were having a good time, they still lived with the dread that they would die, as humans were sudden, and they were swift, like thunder, like the thunderbirds that Indian lore worshiped like the rats worshiped their simple and idle gods. And since the rats have evolved and grown smarter, more intelligent, rat traps were becoming more clever, more carefully devised to kill them instantly. And in a very sudden second, as sudden as a knife in the throat, they would be dead, and rats would eat their decaying organs. It was the only way to survive in this rat-scummed city, but even they couldn't survive long. Rats only lived an average of two years. Once they have survived everything, they often got cancer. And nothing could be done for them, except to devour everything of them except the tumor. Everything but the thing that killed them would be gone.
Rats believed that once you died, you simply lived on in the machines, into the fine mechanical wires and cogs of Seattle, and you will work endlessly, until something has made you malfunction and flawed, and the humans would throw you away, and the rats would adopt their bodies into their city. The rats lived on in the form of buzzes and clicks and whirrs and the red glaring eyes that stared at them when the machines turned on, begging them to answer how they became this way. But the rats outside of the God Realm only knew, and they knew that the gods they once lived with took them away, and made them have a use again, until they needed an upgrade.
Many silver and white-coated rats sat around a table in a silver tinfoil building, celebrating their holiday. They swung their cups and jars of melted chocolate chips, fully intoxicated in the aroma of tiny bits of chicken being cooked on the kindling fire and the sewer water rushing past them, their only little streams and waterfalls in their little city. One rat, with fur that was spottled with a light, fleshy brown, drank until his stomach couldn't take anymore of the hot chocolate, and he puked and laughed and sang silly songs that were passed down from rat generation to rat generation, as his pink bare hands shook and his tail swung all over, and his eyes were blurred and his mind slurred and he seemed to be drowning in the cacophony of the party, of the chocolate making him drunk until he could barely stand up, and he thought it was a good thing that he was drunk. Because if he was drunk, he forgot about everything, because everything seemed to hurt him. And the rat's name was Benjamin Button.
Benjamin Button was raised by humans a long time ago, as so many seemed to laugh at his name, but when he told him of his story, they often quickly revered him for his courage and his boldness, and the name Benjamin Button was no longer a cutesy toy name that was often given from fussy rat owners, but a badge of honor. But now it was no longer that. Now it was simply a reminder of why he hurt, the thorn that constantly throbbed in his heart, the black webs that he could never tear away from his eyes, and sometimes he cried about it, and sometimes he just drank. He had no one who could care for him. No more humans. No womrats. He wasn't interested in menrats either. He wanted to be alone, suffering in the decay of his brain and the decay of his emotions for the rest of his life, with no one to tend to him. The rats often liked to get him drunk despite his misery, as without sugar alcohol, Benjamin Button was depressed, sometimes suicidal even, and they tried to keep him as happy as possible. Drinking was his anti-depressant. His escape from the loneliness, the bleeding of his prickly thorned heart, the scars that resided in his body for a year. And it was almost another year for him. Here comes cancer. Here it comes to make him dead and gone, and everyone could feast on his high sugar alcohol levels. So much for his bravery, his valor, his pride. It would be gone in as soon as a year. And he knew there was simply no saving it.
Benjamin Button had many scars on his hands and wrists, his front fangs were chipped, and his fur was dingy, as the scars seemed to show through his white wine fur that no longer sparkled but were almost a dull gray, as dull as some people thought he was when he was sober. He banged his jug against the table, his laughter was loud, booming, cacophonous, and his tongue constantly twisted every which way between words, and his words felt like they didn't belong to a rat, but to a damaged snake.
"Hey, would you cure to play anuther round of cards? Anuther anuther anuther? Come on! I'm dyin' ovur here!" He puked several minutes ago, but he was still drinking. He didn't care at all if he would drink until he passed out, or cold and dead. He would've preferred the latter.
The rats continued to play cards, and the aces and spades and hearts flew towards them with bullet speed, and Benjamin simply listened to the sound of the stream behind the home, wishing that one day, he would have the time to jump into the emerald blown glass water, and make himself turn purple and blue as he would drown himself and be chopped to pieces by the filter at the end of the river. Be combined with all the shit and the piss and simply turn into clean water for the gods to drink. He couldn't think of anything more peaceful knowing his body would be drunk by the gods.
His hands with scars caused by blades, sharp white fangs of the human gods, he wished they would've killed him.
The memories couldn't hurt him now, being this drunk, being this stupid. Being stupid was bliss, all the wisemen said. And they were right. When he was stupid, he couldn't remember a damn thing. He couldn't remember his first memory of being born into the human home, with the human girl playing with him ever since he grew into his legs and he could walk on his own, when she bottle fed him and let her dig into the pockets of her sweatshirt and look into her ears and expect many more chocolate chips and treats to be hidden there. The human girl was very kind to him, and loved him, and that was what killed him. That she loved him so much, that when what seemed to be her myalgia flared up and she couldn't take care of him anymore, he was sold to another owner, an owner who seemed kind when he was speaking to her about all his knowledge of rats, how long he has been taking care of them, how he loved them so, but when he was taken into his home, he soon learned that it wasn't so. That the owner wasn't a kind man who knew all sorts of things about rats and was going to make poor old Benjamin Button live a happy life like he did with the girl, but he was going to torture him, he was going to do experiments on him that were comparable to the experiments done on Jews during the Holocaust, and he often neglected to feed him sometimes, just to see how long it would take him to pass out from the lack of food.
It was then that this owner enforced something inside Benjamin that this rat society soon knew to obey, the laws of their society, the laws that must be followed by every rat to make the city as efficient as possible, to make sure every rat and every machine would function just as fine as the clocks all around them, ticking, ticking, ticking, the seconds passing by quickly, the minutes soon following, the hours soon following, the days, the years, and Benjamin would've felt even worse about himself if it wasn't followed in the society, for even if he was a rat he knew what kind of a scum of an animal it was, and that if the humans wanted to keep their societies and cities running like clockwork, they could destroy every single one of them, and their cities and lives would be so much better without the black rat shitting and pissing and chewing on everything, while tittering and chittering all around their old disgusting homes.
Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. The clicking of the clock in the man's room. It was dark, the man's face, hairy and his eyebrows protruding to the rat's eye, his glasses sparkling as he could barely see his blue eyes that always seemed to stare into his animal-like soul, while the light that shined like the sun in his basement waned and swung over him, a pendulum to the ticking of the clock, moving in a rhythm that was making the rat with the dirty, shit-caked fur nervous. He watched as the man with the eyes he couldn't see take another rat, squirming and worming, trying to escape his cruel grasp. He thought he could hear a slight cackle as he shoved them inside a glass case, the rat's pink infant hands constantly touching and slamming and scratching at the glass box, wishing to be free. But he could hear in its tiny, nearly squawking like voice that was lined with terror and fear, that it wanted out, it wanted to get away from this man, that it wanted to live a life of peace, a life of harmony back in the rat city, and it was asking him to be let out, out of his small, insanity-ridden cage.
He wished the same for himself too. He wished the same for everyone. But he knew he could never escape this man. His grasp was too strong. His power was beyond gods. He was Satan, as Benjamin believed that the devil could have more power than God, and he was more frightening than God, and at times, he could do whatever he wanted, and staring at this man's cold face he thought he was staring at the devil with the wire-rimmed glasses that contained the cold blue eyes that belonged to a cold, blue man who wore all red.
He wished the rat to be free, but he knew this had to be a trap somehow. The man wouldn't let him go so easily, without a few scars and bleeds.
The man's finger touched a small, red lever, that looked so dark without the light swinging above them, and his small rat-like heart palpitated as he stared at it, wondering what would Satan do if he touched this lever, if he let the rat go.
Nothing was ever going to be that easy. There was always a price in everything. And he could sense it in his whiskers. He could sense it in his baby hands.
His breath followed the rhythm of his heart. He slowly reached for it. He couldn't let the rat stay inside there, and die, trapped in his own shit and piss, trapped before he could have one last joy. His nose sniffed it, thinking there had to be something wrong in the lever he could sense, but there was nothing he could take in his nose and whiskers that told him this was a trap, but he knew it in his soul that Satan wouldn't let them go away so easily. He knew there was something wrong here, and that one of them was going to die.
The man ushered him to pull it. His voice, even when he tried to be sweet, it sounded condescending and loud and he could sniff that he had KFC before he wanted to do this little experiment in his breath. The smell of mashed potatoes and fried chicken skin no longer a welcoming scent to him, but one that would remind him of this awful incident, as he smirked his yellow, piss-stained teeth once he let the rat go, once he freed him of his glass cage.
I know there's something wrong here. I know this rat isn't going to live much longer. I know this man is an awful man, a terrible man, and he's going to make me do something to him, my friend I only knew for five seconds, my friend who is going to die.
The man cackled again, and the smell of the mashed potatoes and gravy overwhelmed him, and while it usually made him hungry, it made him think how disgusting the food really was, to eat meat sauce from another dead animal, to eat potatoes crushed and looking like yellow piss-stained clouds, like the man's teeth. He wanted to throw up. He wanted to run away, but he knew there was no escape. The man held something deftly in his hand, and the smell was overpowering. Not of mashed potatoes and gravy, but something sweet now, something delicious, and he couldn't escape from the man, because he barely ate in so long. He was left in his cage for such a long time without any food, without any companionship, and he needed something in his stomach, he needed a friend inside him, right now.
And that was what happened.
The chocolate chips in his hand, so sweet, so arousing in his mouth, it triggered something in his brain, one of Satan's old tricks, that he needed to kill his five second friend now, and eat his flesh, eat him and kill him and fill himself up with his heart and organs. The rat didn't deserve to live. He needed to live. He needed to survive this man, and he was willing to do everything to get away from him, to be free from him, and if he had to play his little games, he had to, because he imagined himself one day getting out of this hell, and if he followed Satan's rules to a tee, he would get out, he would be free, he would be damned and alive.
And so his five second friend was dead in five seconds. Everything was gone from him except his bones. He even ate his eyes, his baby hands that he knew all rats had, and he cried and sobbed over his body while the man wrote notes on his little notepad, while he continued to shovel more of his heart inside him, tears streaming his face, blood streaming from his face, and he wished he could be taken away from here, as the man soon picked him up, put him in his cage, and he was surrounded by darkness yet again, and for many days, he did not eat and he had no one to talk to, except his growing insanity, his growing pain and his growing torment.
On that day, he didn't believe in god. Only the humans. They were gods of the rats. They controlled them, they killed them, they ate them even if they needed to, they did everything to them, and thus, rats were only bottom-feeders and savages, while humans controlled all the animals in the world, but the rat truly was the lowliest, the most disgusting, the most hideous, and he couldn't deal with those facts anymore, and he wished God would take pity on him, if he existed, if he even cared for rats.
All the rats inside his basement were tortured for weeks, until one day, the man was captured by police. He murdered 50 people, and he was also charged with animal cruelty. He even soon found out from the police officer's discussion between each other that he even fed the rats with the remains of the women he killed combined with dog food, and he threw up and wished the police would take them away to heaven, to a land where they could forget their sins and torture and live in a land where everyone was peaceful and nice and knew your name, not in a land where they were treated like this, by a psychopathic man who simply took his rage and frustration and his fantasies on women and them, the rats that the police truly never cared about, as they thought they were unfit for being adopted. They were violent and killed any other rat with them as soon as they saw them, and they began euthanizing them, because they thought it was the right thing to do. To take them away from their own personal hell to a real one.
Benjamin Button was an intelligent rat, probably the most intelligent out of the entire lot the man had with him, as in a flurry of panic inside his insanity-ridden brain, he escaped while the rest of the rats were killed out of pity, and Benjamin wished now that he could've stayed there, under the Needle of Mercy that were in the humans' hands, because now he couldn't stand himself. He wished the man had killed him. He wished everything had killed him. The wounds he was given inside his skull and his soul continue to bleed from within, and the only thing to shut it out was death. Sweet, merciful death.
And sugar alcohol from the thing that killed his five second friend in five seconds.
As they sat around the table now as he thought and as the memories sunk into his feet like water, he didn't sing. He simply wished the memories wouldn't intoxicate him anymore. He wished they would disappear, that he could take all the memories and make them float away in the wind. He wished no one would no longer call him a brave rat. He wished his pity ran out. He wished everything ran out, including his life, which he knew the tumors would rest in soon, that he would soon die from all the bodies and all the sins he committed to these gods, and his body would be eaten too, and he prayed everyday for it, even if he truly didn't believe in the actual god the gods worshiped.
He scratched the table quietly, until from the sounds of a rat shouting outside, his friends looked out of the door to see what the commotion was about, and it was a rat with white sparkling fur like freshly fallen snow, holding a black, plastic binder that had all the pages secured in a plastic wrap, and he yelled, saying, "I found something from the gods! The gods are truly blessing us on this wonderful day, hurrah hurrah! It is not food, for I have tasted it, and it tastes disgusting! Something that just dropped from their heavens, something that we can truly learn from the gods, it's here, all in this little black book, it is here that we can learn, and the gods have decided to bless us! Hurrah!"
"Too bad we don't know what any of the text in that book means, you doofus! It's all in this human language called 'Engulish.' And none of us know that. Look at the little hooks and the little weird shapes all these letters make. Are you kidding me that we can read this? We only know of one guy who could read this for us, and that's Thaddeus, the Knower of All Humans' Tongues. He studies every single human language and I'm sure he can translate this Englulish. So don't get your panties in a bunch, it'll be a while before you can learn more about the gods. They're tricky, those gods."
And Benjamin simply wished they would leave the black binder alone and let it be chopped to pieces by the filter. He never cared anymore for the humans, especially that they hurt him for what seemed to be so long ago, and the book looked so ugly, so unappealing with its plain black cover and all the pages being smooth and shiny. He wished he could tell the rats that they should let things be, but the alcohol was deftly in their system, and they looked all over town for Thaddeus, to translate the ugly book, to know more about the hooks and holes of the letters, to learn that the gods had always truly hated them, and there was no more hope for them.
But everyone else said Benjamin was always negative. That he was depressed. That he always ruined everyone's fun.
But it wasn't fun to deal with that suffering many years ago.
He took a swig of the chocolate chip drink, and he followed them to Thaddeus' house, where his house was adorned with so many artifacts of the humans that were thrown away, such as Bibles that he translated over the years, Indian and Buddhist texts, even Buddha statues and Christ sculptures that were beginning to instill fear in him as he hung stiffly with the blood running all over his face and body, with the crown of thorns on his head, and Benjamin wished they could go back to drinking and drowning their sorrows. He didn't care for what the humans wrote. It could be anything. It could even be what the humans had called "pornography" and "fanfiction", which he knew that whatever this binder was, it was ultimately useless to their little rat society, as the rats didn't know whether to take the texts of the humans seriously except Thaddeus, who believed in so many idle gods that many rats said he would be killed by a human someday. And he said to them, "So it goes," which was a line from what he called a "Kurt Vonnegut book". And no one understood Thaddeus, because everything he said was cryptic and educated.
"We think the book was written in this language by the humans called…uh…'Englalick.' Humans are so weird over their names. But we were wondering if you could translate this, if it would be useful to us, if the humans have blessed us with something truly great."
Thaddeus simply furrowed his brows as he looked at the binder, stating that the language was called "English" (and you better learn it you foolish mongrels) and it was a common human tongue, and that the book was called The Dark Wings of Death (scary!) and it was made by someone named "Wind Alirick (also known as Anansi, whoever he is)", and he said that he didn't truly know how long it would take him to translate it, but as was the case of his Bibles and Buddha texts, it probably wouldn't take too long, as it was only about 100 or so pages. The rats closely huddled their heads to the Translator, wishing to read the text, wishing to know of what the gods have been saying in their stories and if they could learn anything about them, but Thaddeus said that there were too many illiterate rats like them that it was possibly impossible for any rat to tell stories, because their brains couldn't take them but his.
"Ah shut up Thaddeus! You can only understand them because everyone at those labs injected you with something that made you smarter! Meanwhile some of us were only injected with diseases and stuff that made us act weird. I mean, look at Benjamin, he's been through a fuckin' awful ordeal. We're not as goddamn lucky as you."
"Of course not," he hissed, his words slithering like a snake. "And I don't think of myself as anyone higher. Of course, Benjamin could understand English if he wanted to, but he's too busy mulling over his traumas. I understand he went through a lot of things, but he doesn't need to think about them everyday. He doesn't need to wonder if he's going to constantly die because that man is going to torture him. He's gone. That's that. He doesn't need to be scared anymore. I wonder if he's ever going to get over it."
He heard his evil slimy words, his mollified eyes staring at him, becoming as long as piercing needles. "What did you say about me? You don't understand what the hell I've been through. You wouldn't be saying the same shit if you were there. You wouldn't be saying I'm this weak goddamn rat…"
"I wasn't. I was just simply saying that you need to get over this…"
His anger rose after every word, and it soon reached a peak, a red sharp pointing needle that stabbed and clawed through his brain, making him irrationally think that Thaddeus needed to be dead, more dead than him. "I'll kill you you son of a bitch!"
His claws reached out for his heart, for his flesh. His teeth that was chipped seemed to be so sharp as he bit down on the brown shit-colored rat, and he screeched and constantly screamed, "Get this scoundrel off of me! Get him off! Get him off!"
His friends surrounded him, keeping the drunken rat that was kicking and flailing his legs and raking the air with his claws away from Thaddeus, and he simply huffed as he stared at his bleeding wounds, his broken glasses that he made himself with wires that the humans discarded, his furniture doused with blood as they tumbled and chewed and scratched and ripped. "I hope you'll be paying for my new pair of glasses you savage! And look at my furniture! I hope you can clean that up!"
"Fuck you! I ain't paying for shit! What do you think I am, loaded with money? I can't help you! I can't even help myself…myself…myself…"
And he broke into sobs as his friends carried him away, as Thaddeus echoed that it would take him two weeks to fully translate the book, and his friends stared at the dirty blood-ridden rat with scorn and disdain, as Benjamin simply wanted to run away and escape from the situation, but he coughed and pretended he was sick and dying and his rationalization was destroyed with the cancer that was growing inside of him, but even if his friends were slightly drunk, they weren't falling for it. They knew his rationalization was destroyed since his traumas had settled in.
"What the hell's your problem, Benjamin? It's been a year since that incident with that man happened. We don't care anymore. How about you sob about it back home and never talk to us again? We had enough. Supply yourself with your own chocolate chip drink and get the hell out."
While he tried to show that he never cared about their friendship to them, he did. He cared too much. He thought of himself now truly alone, without anyone to comfort him, not even his chocolate chips, not even his grape juice and wine. Benjamin also had no money, and his home was slowly being taken away, and he would soon be devoured by the hungry rats. There was nothing more waiting for him at this life. Everything was gone. Everything was wasted. The man known as Satan took it, like he took away all those rats' lives, like he took away his sanity. And his friends left, leaving him only to comfort himself with the darkness, with the pity of the demons that rested in the blackness of being.
He decided he was leaving the rat city. He would live among the gods, to kill him to maim him to torture him. He no longer cared for what his friends and what Thaddeus and what anyone else who even looked at him would think about him as soon as he would leave, and he reached for the soft golden angelic light at the opening of the Seattle city above him, and he wished he could reach it. He wished he could be taken away from this awful city and into the city of the gods and demons, and he could live in pain and truth and horror, and he could no longer live in blissful ignorance, in harmony.
But he sighed. It wasn't going to happen today. He couldn't reach the sewer duct's opening as he tried to hold his baby hands up high. He wanted to be free, but the gods won't let him be free. They wished for him to suffer. God wanted him to suffer. The gods of gods no longer cared for the scum, the bottom-feeder he was. And he thought that this would only be the day where he would be a coward and live in his disgusting, small home that was no longer a home, and cry himself to sleep, and hope the next day would be as less painful as it was now.
Slowly, the alcohol would drain from him. He would become sober. He would go through a terrible withdrawal. He would go mad, insane, he could kill someone, he could scream, he could be taken to an institution for mentally unbalanced rats and eaten away by killing them with gas and serving up his body like a nice little celebratory feast.
He would just die like his five second friend did, in five seconds.
And he simply covered his baby infant hands into his head, and he cried away the night. The night oozed out of his tears. And the day came, as the tears glowed like the sun and made everything, including his pain, bleed away.
He wished when he died he wouldn't live on in the machines. He actually wished he would live on in the sun that was shining so nicely in the sky. He wished he would be as remembered and as revered as a god, and he wished there was something he could do to make that happen.