Benjamin held the gauntlet of chocolate in his hands as his mouth had drooled of nothing but obscenities and pain, and he was drunk, because rats like him were useless, and would soon be eaten alive by the other rats.

One chug of chocolate. One chug of grape juice. One chug of milk and peach juice and eating a chocolate bar and a piece of gourmet cheese (that was only Kraft singles). He had binged, only because he had nothing else in his life to love, to die for, (food was the only thing he truly loved in life until it was out of his mouth and into his stomach) and the machine gods, the rat king that had gazed upon him with shit-covered eyes, had hated him.

He rolled up a grape leaf and smoked it. One foot on the desk, gazing out into the lonely world upon his cardboard home. He saw the shit chafe the walls of the sewers. Such a nice day to be a rat today. Soon their tails would all become one and they would be stuck until they died.

Flies have rested upon his chocolate head. He wondered if he was going to die soon.

He swigged the juice and the grape leaf cigar, and he saw as the other rats have talked about the book. Tumbletim knew everything, he thought. He read such great classics from the humans and translated them in their language. The Catcher in the Rye, the Bible, Little Women, fairytales from the Grimm brothers. Many stories were crafted by the gods above the sewers, the humans, and he didn't thank them, though he knew he once was loved by one, and destroyed by one. Humans were all spectrums of good and evil. Rats were only evil. They only cared about themselves, and Benjamin only cared about finding that love from his owner again.

The cigar burnt out and had sparked his hand in a stinging flame, and stomped it out. Could've made the entire rat city burst in flames. Good. Let it burn, he thought. Another swig of grape juice. More chocolate and cheese. It was time to go out to the wonderful, sun-sparkled world of Seattle, the city he hadn't set foot in a year, which seemed to him be 20 years since he saw his owner.

Her name. He couldn't think of what it was anymore. But her face. Her shining, angelic face with a mouth poised to eat her food like a beartrap.

Ah his owner, where was he? She was beautiful, with brown hair, glasses, and braces, until she soon had a muscle disease that she couldn't take care of her ratties anymore. But she loved every one of them. She loved Benjamin Button the most.

The other rats were named Gatsby, Beowulf, Holden, and Tyler Durden. He wasn't sure why one of them had two names like him, but her owner said he had to, as the other she wanted to name him had no name, though she believed it could've been Jack.

She fed them a nice ratty meal everyday, and he had other rats to play with. And they all were kind and courteous, not rotten scumbags like himself! She often carried him around in a pouch and they went to stores, gatherings, even in a restaurant with her parents who were disgusted, but said nothing to stop her love with Benjamin. He had a nice life, a very nice life, while it lasted.

It was gone. It was a withering flame. He only was tortured by a man who claimed to love him, but he had forced him to kill another rat when he was only so young, his instincts so innocent.

He wondered the name of the man, but he never got any clues, other than his glasses, and his dollar bills that lined the walls.

Benjamin thought he had a picture of his old owner, oh how pretty she was, so glassy and china-faced, so beautiful! He had stolen it out of her albums a long time ago and had kept it with him, ever since it had been smeared with shit and the rare and human and rat-laced rat food in the cages of the man who hated him, but always he kept it, even if it reminded him of how much his life had hurt him.

He only lived a year in this life, and he was sure he couldn't live much longer. The cancer was beginning to boil, bubble in his body, soon to sear and burn the rest of his body. And it would soon take him over, a parasite that had claimed all his organs, his brain, his lungs and heart.

He didn't know the woman's name, but the face, the bright, steel-covered smile, he remembered it all too well.

And he wanted to return to her, to return to a life of luxury and a life of peace. The disease she had, it couldn't affect her too much, could it? She could have one rat. She could take care of her beloved Benjamin Button. The rat that was named after her favorite story, a curious case indeed he said, as he had stopped lugging around his many sugary drinks, his chocolate that had made his brain swim, and he wanted to escape, to go to the metropolis of the humans, the city of Seattle, where many angels and devils had lied, where the goldenrods had bled through like the sun, where the sea had washed away the sins of the blind deaf and dumb.

The water, even the sewers here, was holy. He would soon collect his reclamation. He would soon be reborn as the rat king of rat kings, the savior Benjamin Button, the rat who knew so much more about the rat condition, the human loving condition, the god loving condition, and how literature from the humans had meant nothing to them and could only be applied to their brains, not their hearts.

Tumbletim, what was his purpose here? To recite the stories of the insane, like that story he just picked up from the sewers? Many writers were mentally ill. Many of them had drunk alcohol till they couldn't take it anymore, like him. Many had no other occupation but writing, and killing off characters in their head, and killing worlds and making new ones. They were godlike, but they were the same as him: rats. Filthy, disgusting, cannibal rats.

He rationalized that gods were all rats. They all were conniving and thieving and disgusting and pitiful. They all had done terrible things. They all desired terrible things. They all wished for terrible things to happen upon their worshipers. They were dark, hollow, not at all holy, dragon-like, flesh-like, snake-like, woman-like and angelic. They all were rats, and he was just as holy as them. He held up the jug of chocolate up in the dismal air as he could hear the rain beating against the ground above them as if the drops were knives and axes, and he could imagine the world was beginning to be born into spring, as the creatures had arrived from their holes, as the snow had melted away into heaven, as the flowers had blossomed, as the trees began to have soft nails on their fingertips. The dawn had grown darker, into the daylight of the afternoon, and he had climbed the shitty hole of the sewers and had begun to see the golden light of Seattle, the silver buildings and the bronzed sun that lied in wake for him. The cars had sped by, the people kept walking. They never noticed that a rat was here, a rat that would live with his old owner again, who would soon tell her about the wretched man who had kept him, the man who had proclaimed himself to be the god of women, the richest and smartest man in the world as he stacked his dollar bills across from each other, until the walls were no longer red and bare.

The man may have had schizophrenia. The man may had a very diseased disorder. His brain no longer worked right. His morality was never the same when his illness had taken him over, his own form of cancer, his own spoonful of mercury he had sipped up when he was a child.

"I am coming I am coming I am coming," he had said. "I am coming I am coming I am coming. My owner, my love of my life, the stars still seek for you, the man could never make me blind. His fingers had never shoved my eyes away. I can still see from these shit and piss-covered holes. The moon seeks you. The sun seeks you. God seeks you. I am coming for you. The gods of the world cannot stop me, because I am a rat who is never sick of the truth, the truth that those who are ill, those who believe they can be godlike, are rats. Lower than filth. And I, my precious darling, am praising a god such as you. No other human is my god. Just you."

Tumbletim had finished translating the story. It was only about 80,000 words long, the story of the raven, the story of the end of the world. There was something different about this story. His fingers had traced each word, and he had felt an inch of mead and golden blood inside them. The writer had shed his life in this story. He had shed his dissonance and his harmony inside it. He had sung the tunes of the story, had wrapped the strings around a knob on this story, he had fine-tuned the wires inside this book to keep on playing it in his typewriter. This was a story from a god. A god who could sing the tune of despair and the end of the world. And he could sniff it coming. He could sniff a piece of sharded arsenic in the rain that was supposed to bring forth the life on the trees, the life of the flowers and of the people's minds. A god was telling him that the end of the world was soon, and all the rats had to navigate out of the sewers and praise their gods, before the world had died away like a smothered flame.

Tumbletim had seen the fading brown body of Benjamin disappear in the darkness, and he knew that there was no more ignorant Benjamin. No more rats who truly were rats. It was time to appear in the surface of the human world, the broken glass in the water above, and he had made an announcement to all of his rat friends and fiends, that a god had announced the world was coming to an end, and it was time for the rats to stop living in the sewers and evolve into gods as much as they could. His voice had carried a tinge of disdain, as while humans had always written the stories he enjoyed, he truly hated them otherwise. They had no personalities, unlike the people in the literary world. Holden, Howard J. Campbell, the aliens that always said "so it goes" after a death, and Mr. Trout, such fine literary characters he could understand, unlike the gods upstairs, the gods who had always drank wine and had killed the rats because they were "vermin".

He could feel the shot of mercury affect him after all these years. The dose of medicine that turned him as brilliant and wise as he was now. Very little rats had such a lucky opportunity as his.

"It's time to go up," he had told them.

"It's time to meet the gods. It's time to shake hands with them. It's time to be a part of them. It's time to tell them that we are intelligent and noble creatures too, and we are willing to be a part of their world for a short while."

His brain misfired a neuron. He continued.

"It's time to spread our vile illness to them. To have them die like us. To have them resort to cannibalism like we always had. Humans are not so far apart from rats. They only have a bigger brain. They only have a sense of elegance and a sense of what's right and wrong. And, like the rest of the animals in the world, unless it is taught to us, we have no morality. We just do what we please."

The depression had began to curl in his brain, rotting all the life that once made him intelligent. He had become brain-numb and brain-dead. The rats had stared at his claws for so long, as he gripped his head, and had leaned back and cried.

"As the humans are our witness, it's time to bring them down, and bring them…death. I'm sure the rat king will tell us the same, but if not, I don't care! I don't care, I just want to die! I just want to rot in the ground and stare at the stars from the dirt forever! The stars are bladed glass, and I want to be cut upon them, my face is horrible, see my face? It is lined up with scratches!"

The rats were always used to insanity, but never from Tumbletim. He was always calm, peaceful, and had told the rat world of the great stories that lied beyond the shit water and the stars from yellow and green and red lights from the traffic. But he was low. He was down. He could never get out of it, except with time, as the dead rats had continued to stitch up the hours and minutes, as the alarms had shrieked a droning siren, telling every rat to go beyond the shit-covered world and to one that was covered in steel and chrome.

"Tell the humans that we are not vermin, as we let them die slowly on our pestilential breath."

The rats did not understand why they became the mortals that had killed so many of their gods, with their plague.

But they did, and they became slayers of those they used to hold so high in their esteem. The human race had wilted like bloody violets in the wake of an ushering and calamitous storm that would split the Earth in two.

—

"Come, Blazie, it's time to eat our daily meal, and to let us pray to God."

She hardly moved away from Gravity's Rainbow. She wanted to keep reading, even when her father had torn the bread in two, had given one to his daughter that he regretted seeing her birthed by his wife, the fair maiden of the sea, as her hair billowed around her neck and she drank mead and Guinness, while the father always had a liquid dinner of Pabst and Budweiser. The cheap beers always rang supreme to him, as he chugged it all down, the Pabst traveling to his stomach as he closed his mouth and let the drink dissolve slowly with a numbed happiness. A happiness that he didn't have to feel like he had to take care of Blaze, lil' Blazie, as he stuffed his lips with a cigarette and slowly chewed over their black bread.

I don't understand why you're that way…

Sometimes I would rather have you dead…

Her gentle hands had picked up the bread, and she tore a small piece and gently lifted it to her mouth. It was good bread despite their poverty. Possibly the best she ever had. It reminded her of her mother's bread, the kind she made that always melted in her mouth with butter that was so creamy, straight from the shepherds in Ireland themselves…

She often let Blaze had a small sip of Guinness, even if she was only such a small babe. She twirled around in her mother's pink dress, had sat underneath it while she swigged her drinks, and she felt warm and safe. She was surrounded by a veil of rosy pink, and she imagined it like the dawn, with ovulating stars that would soon be drained into the daylight.

"It can go both ways, sweetie," he said, as if he read her mind.

She clasped her hands around her knees and sat underneath her mother, so protected by her godliness, so safe from her father…

He once broke a bottle of Budweiser and aimed the sharded nozzle right up against my mother's throat…

I felt like she would always protect me, away from this monster. Whenever they fought, I went under her dress. And she understood. She knew why I was scared.

His fingers twinged whenever he played with his cards, his own form of fighting against the painful drolling hours in the streets. He smoked his cigarettes until they nearly burnt his fingers and mouth. He asked Blaze if she wanted to play Black Jack, and she said no.

"And why not?"

His voice sounded indignant, offended that his daughter wouldn't spend any quality time with him.

He slapped his hand on a beetle and he crunched its head off with his silver, iron teeth. Masticated the insect slowly, biting into its brain, the shell crickly crackly against his tongue.

"I just don't want to play, dad."

The only time she had ever called him dad.

And it was the last time.

"You would rather read your dumbass books than play a game with your ol' papa?"

Her father was once again throwing a fit. She was used to it, but she wasn't in the mood. She hoped he would tire himself out with his ramblings and his drinking and his wandering off to dumpsters for food, but her father could hurt her, damage her, and she had no one to protect her. Not even her mother and her Protective Dress. She watched as her father had stood up, carried the can of Pabst, and threw it against her face, the taste and smell of the beer in her tongue and nostrils, as some of it spilled on her pages.

Her stomach churned whenever she smelled the Pabst. It was a heinous smell. The rooms where her father had always drunk and smoked in never washed away, even with the sea of Seattle. She felt like vomiting every time she could smell the scent of two-week-old diabetic piss.

When have you ever loved me?

When have you given me the affection and love I craved, just like my mother had given me?

The dress, the dress. It wasn't there. It couldn't be her cotton shield against her father. The man had begun to rage and his mouth foamed of beer, his fists were made of stone and he crashed them against the buildings, he had told her that he never loved her, and in fact wished she was dead. Oh Blazie. Oh little Blazie. If only we could be friends.

I never loved you.

I never…

I never loved…

Her heart had grown cold inside her chest. It never was ignited with passion. She only loved her mother, and since she died, she never loved again. Her father only had passion for beer and food that was crawling with maggots and black mold and insects. He found an ant and popped one in his mouth. He claimed they were like Mentos.

I wished the raw chicken really had killed you…

But knowing you, you're not a cat. But a wolf. A wolf that eats what it can to survive, and you're eating insects and dirty diapers. You're no longer the father I once knew, or really, I never knew you as a father. You are a sick, depraved man.

She wished her thoughts could travel to his mind. To not say anything to him. Her mouth had carried so many boulders from her words that they were too heavy to lift, and she would rather not say anything, be passive-aggressive towards him.

Those with passive-aggressive tendencies wished they could read their minds, knowing they were angry, and they had to do something to alleviate their madness. Nothing was ever done. Passive-aggressiveness never worked out the way she thought it always would.

I am angry.

I am angry with you.

What did you do to her?

What did you do to my mom? I know Yehl isn't the only one who had done something to her…

Her father, after vomiting his lunch of beetles and ants and diapers in the alleyways, he went back to his cards, mumbling to himself, trying to urge Blaze to play cards with him again. Again, she refused, and he drank more of the diabetic piss and asked her what was wrong with her.

"You never want to do anything with your pappy. It's always your books. It's always eating good food and not the stuff you want to survive on. Beetles have proteins in them you know, and ants chockfull of irons, and…and…"

"Diapers are only waste. You get nothing but shit in your mouth when you eat that, father."

The only and last time she called him father.

Why are you so sick?

You claim there's something wrong with me when I know there's something deeply wrong with you.

You keep eating mold and disgusting, wretched things. You keep drinking nothing but beer. You ramble to yourself about how I'm such a bad child, that I will never achieve your high standards.

I'm glad I'm not what you want me to be.

Because I only wished for you to be dead.

"And praise the almighty Lord for giving us this feast today!"

A can of beans with mold formed on the outer rims of the silver tab. Blaze threw her meal away. Her father ate it scrumptiously.

You're a wolf all right, I know it. You don't even look like a cat. I wonder if my mother picked men at random, sort of as a test for me to overcome.

Her father had stolen more exotic alcohols for him to drink. Coronas and Heineken's. He moved up from the Pabst and Budweiser's to elaborate drinks, until he would soon be drinking wine. The drink that all corrupt drinkers drank, the red wine that flowed with the blood of their murdered citizens and the blood of the children they soon killed in their wives' bellies with their broken wine bottles, still dripping with madness and mania.

He drinks, so much…

He doesn't realize it's going to kill him one day…

He drained one bottle of Corona. Another one emerged from his six-pack. He cracked open the bottle and downed it.

Drinking kills so many people…I hope you realize that you'll just become another statistic.

So many people like you die of alcohol poisoning, or alcohol-related accidents. Or drinking and driving. There's a big one.

Two. He finished another one, wiped his mouth of the frothy ejaculate that came from the bottle. Ripped open another one with his elbow. He swallowed it whole, an alcoholic snake.

I'm going to die of suicide. I know that for sure. I'll die before you take me with you.

The razor blade she held in her pocket, that she lightly touched with her pale fingers, she knew she had it for this purpose, and that she would be the one to take her life, and not her father. Not with his alcoholism making him so sluggish, like a happy snake digesting a full meal in its body.

Maybe I should kill you, right now. No one is going to care. No one important knows who you are. This death will be unreported. You will still be a statistic. A statistic that doesn't have its body fed to the Media Machine, as they drain you of their blood and turn it into words and sensationalist bullshit.

Words made from the bleeding of a person. Like Hemingway had done, what seemed to be long ago.

I could make you bleed, right now, and kill you and I could live my own life, my own fucking life where I get to be by myself with my books. I would rather die with my stomach full of books than beer and rats and shit and bugs.

He swallowed his sixth beer. Inebriated, his head soared, and he could feel the many rats crawling inside him, the bugs and shit too, as he walked over to the streets, asking a cop where a good place they could get to eat on a budget.

"And what kind of budget, sir?"

"A budget where…you know…you have no money at all. I'm poor as shit!"

He croaked a laugh, the officer seeing his blackened teeth, as the maggots and worms bled from his gums.

The cop wrote down the address to the nearest soup kitchen. Blaze's father crumbled it up, threw it away, and took her away from the church where she could smell the frying of chicken and the mashing of mashed potatoes, where delicious food had awaited her, and she knew it was out of her reach, her hands so distant from food that tasted as nearly as good as a beautiful passage in a book.

Her father coughed and hacked as he sipped away at his last Corona, feeling the fingers of a rat poking and prodding his esophagus. She believed during this moment she even saw the man sneeze out a rat, and soon other rats followed out of his mouth, coughing and hacking as many different colors, brown and white and black and black eyes and red eyes of albinos, some even blue, and her father sat on a bench as he gargled all these rats inside him, and had tried to swallow them back inside his body.

He fed them another beetle, as he crushed it and chewed it as if he was a mother bird for many babies who could barely swallow their own food.

Blaze never believed in strange occurrences. She never believed in the mythic, the sage, the strange life outside of the world that her mother had always told her about, but maybe her words on how everything was possible seemed to ring in her brain, as she saw her father split his head open on the concrete, and blood never fell from his brain, but rats, possibly millions of rats; they swarmed the streets, they all feasted on the sweet succored garbage of Seattle, and soon lived in the bottom of the sewers, believing that the humans above them were gods, and they were nothing but savages.

Blaze researched a little on rats. They also believed that machines were gods, dead souls of other rats, they also believed clocks were sacred, they also believed time was a valuable instrument to their lives, as rats could only live for about two years. They believed the stars were light bulbs out there in the universe, and they believed that the other planets were only other homes from humans where they lived in elaborate Victorian houses, where the smell of tea always wafted from the door, where they had servants even wiping their asses, and their cars could drive to anywhere they wanted, even a galaxy millions and billions of miles away. And she surmised that rats were stupid, and poisonous. Because they carried the blood and the life work of her father. He developed many rats inside his body, over time, devouring all the rotten food he ate, becoming the wolf that was only a sack that carried the rodents away from realizing the truth, the one the shadows hid from their black-stained hands.

She stood up, her back misaligned from sleeping in the garbage piles in the streets. When he was alive, she gave him a place to stay. A warm bed, warm food to always eat whenever she wanted, warm hands stroking her soft face, warm kisses on top of her head, telling her that everything would be alright and this god war would soon end as the sun crowed along with the raven…

She saw the shadows move away from her, walking, talking, telling someone she knew (and hated and despised) that the war was soon ending, and new ones would begin in many years. Her eyes, the same color as the beer her father had drunk, had run from the shadows, and to the streets beyond the city.

She saw rats scuttle and crawl underneath her feet. She was reminded of her father. They could've been the very same rats that lived underneath Seattle. She thought if all the rats were actually people her father had disappointed over the years, including her mother. Pick out a rat, any rat, and hope it was her. The maiden that lived in Ireland and had told many stories of the heroes and gods and battles that seeped blood for the Earth, and the black eyes that killed all the golden beer color from her eyes and had given the shadows their life.

You're gone now.

I'm glad.

But yet you still seem to be there.

Mocking me.

Using all these events to test me.

The rats were what you truly were.

If I took all of them, I would make your body with the rats, I could restitch your head with the rats' fur, I could make your teeth with the rats' teeth, I could make your eyes with the blue-eyed rats' eyes.

You were just a big rat.

I blame Yehl for killing my mother.

But I think you were also part of the reason she died too.

Why she picked you as the father and never left you to raise me herself is a question I could never solve.

I could never mourn you, because I hated you.

I could never celebrate your death, because I don't want to become you.

An empty bottle of red wine lied next to her feet. She always hated the smell of red wine, because it reminded her of another person she hated. Hated more than her father. Hated more than Yehl.

She opened the bottle, opened her bloody dehydrated mouth, and had sucked all the wine from the bottle, had sucked it dry as if she was a hungry baby in need of nourishment, a hungry babe who hadn't eaten in days. She licked it clean of every last lick of red wine, then the bottle was smashed on the streets, killing a rat, the blood collecting on the streets as the blind deaf and dumb began to fall apart. She imagined them as dominoes, one falling after the other, into a curved, delicate line. She had drank all the power she could get from the god she hated, the god that was no more, and she felt his influence over her, his hatred and his greed, as tears soon rolled down her cheeks, the memories of her innocence so clear to her suddenly, when she slept after her mother had told her stories, and the hiding in her dress whenever her father was upset.

She wished she could be underneath her, until the world burned down in flames, having her tell her no harm would come to her.

Why didn't you leave him?

None of this would've happened if you stayed with me. You would've never died from your cancer. You would never be abused by him. You would've kept protecting me, under your celestial dress. Under your motherliness, your godliness that I soon tasted from the same honey and mead you drank…

Tears stung her eyes. She stopped near a restaurant that smelled faintly of clam chowder and she puked all the memories she had with her father, her eyes shut, her mouth expelling so much hatred and fear that she felt her ribs become swollen and bruised. She vomited all the hatred inside her, until a rat came out, a rat that was as big as her head, black, with blue eyes, with a tail of shit and other small, struggling and feeble rats, following him.

The rat, covered with puke, ran away from her sight, the hatred that she dissolved in her stomach as she swallowed it whole like a voracious snake, and soon formed into a rat king.

Like father, like daughter.

She wiped her mouth, and vowed to never drink red wine, or any other wines, again.

The crows settled in the trees above her, looking at her with crystal blue eyes. One carried a red thread of a vein from a dead man in the city. He dropped it, and it settled in the earth, becoming a blood blossom.