EAT YOUR PHEASANT, DRINK YOUR WINE

by Shanthi Sekaran

Kensington

Henry Wheeler walks into the Inn Kensington looking for all the world like a man who's just gotten laid. He wears a humid sort of smile and his arms dangle from his shoulders like sausage ropes. With him is a woman: younger, her long dark hair parted in the middle, her mouth set straight and firm. She leads him by the hand like a mother. He bumps into a square table, holds his hand up, and mumbles something, still smiling, still wrapped in the good love or slow sex or whatever has tugged him into this Friday morning. Shaila has spotted him, I can tell. Her chest tenses. Dread and longing course by on opposite tracks as our man Henry scoots into a booth, flips his hair back, squints, grins, and examines the hot sauce before him.

He takes a few seconds to spot us. His smile drops. The woman is talking and he tries to look at her, but his eyes dart back, again and again, to Shaila. At last, he gets up.

"Fuck," Shaila whispers. "Fuck fuck." He walks to the bathroom and Shaila gets up and follows.

They speak all at once. They stop. I can feel the pump of Shaila's heart, the heat rising up her neck. They stand and look at each other, waiting.

"What are you doing here?" she finally asks.

"I need to come clean, Shaila."

"Henry."

"I need to."

"No."

"I won't tell anyone you were involved—"

"No. You promised."

"Cynthia says it's breaking me. She said I need to get this off my conscience."

"Cynthia."

He points weakly to the booth.

Shaila shakes her head, faster and faster.

"Cynthia said if I just go to the police and tell them about the—"

"Cynthia," she hisses. "Cynthia."

"You'll be fine, Shaila—"

"They'll know, Henry! They'll know I was there!"

Diners begin to turn to the noise. A manager stomps toward us. That's when I leap from her pocket and run. They see me. They all see me. A lady screams. Feet everywhere, scraping chairs, mayhem. I escape through the door and scoot behind a telephone poll, my chest pounding.

Shaila finds me. The street is quiet again, but for a man standing in the café doorway, growling and cursing. "What were you doing?" she asks me.

"Creating a diversion."

"You could have been killed!"

A rat's heart, on average, beats four hundred times a minute. This sort of excitement is no good for me. My heart isn't used to such things.

* * *

Henry Wheeler came into our lives the night Shaila found some chickens in a supermarket dumpster. On Telegraph Avenue, the surge of feet had calmed for the night. Only the odd clutch of sneakers passed by, all of them talking at once, none bothering to look down, none willing to part with a dollar bill or food still warm in restaurant doggie bags. I was fine. There's always food for a rat on Telegraph. But from inside her jacket pocket, I could hear Shaila's belly rumble.

I poked my head out. "Let's find you something to eat," I said. She looked down at me, her brown eyes glazed with hunger. The neon lights of the smoke shop lit her skin a pale blue. I tugged at her pocket. She rose on unsteady knees. If I could have carried her myself, I would have. If I could have brought her a feast, I would have. The best I could do was keep her moving.

The supermarket on Shattuck threw out its fresh food at ten p.m., and she'd learned to dive in, sift through the salad-bar detritus, and find the packaged foods. I had only to skim the surface of the trash heap to find a good plump tomato, a heel of stale bread, a few cheese cubes. She sifted and sighed and I nibbled. She gagged and cursed and I swallowed. Finally, she struck gold. "Look at this!" she called.

She held aloft a black plastic container. "Roasted chicken!" She pried open the lid, stood right in the dumpster, and tore at the meat with her nails. She held out a morsel for me, salty and fatty with some kind of red peppery paste rubbed into the skin.

"Look!" Shaila pointed. In the dumpster behind her sat four more packaged chickens.

She returned to Telegraph triumphant, a tower of chickens tucked into her elbow: "Motherfuckers! I bring you chickens!" A few men sat in a tight clutch and passed something around. You'd think they'd have jumped up for the food, but no one budged. It wasn't food they were looking for.

One man did get up. I hadn't seen him before. The shop lights gleamed off his hair as he lit a cigarette. He nodded at Shaila, plucked a chicken from her stack, and sank to the curb.

Never have I seen a human eat so fast. One minute the chicken was there, whole and plump and orange brown. The next, she was nothing but rib cage and ankles.

He looked at Shaila and she stared back. "Are you not hungry?" he asked.

"Who are you?" she replied.

He tore off the wishbone and held it out to her. "Henry Wheeler."

She snatched it. "Why're you out here?" she asked.

He blinked. "I don't understand the question."

The man was well dressed in a thick turtleneck and denim jacket. He had the sort of strong jaw and square chin that humans are known for. I don't trust a strong jaw. I don't trust a square chin.

From his belt he unhooked a metallic mug. "You want to know why I'm on the street?"

"Yeah."

"Why are you out here?"

"Stepdad."

He nodded. "I hear that a lot. Out here."

"Oh yeah? You talk to a lot of people? Out here?"

He picked at his front teeth.

"Who are you really?" she asked.

"What do you mean?"

"I mean I've never seen you before, but you roll up today in your nice jeans and your jacket looking all clean, and you talk like you know what it's like to be out here, but you don't look like you know what it's like. You look like you took a shower this morning."

"Fucking stepdads," was all he said. He reached up. She held out the wishbone. They both pulled. Shaila won.

He lit a fresh cigarette and we watched the ash grow until it dropped and scattered in a gray shower. "You sleeping out tonight?" he asked.

"Yes."

"It's gonna be a cold one."

"Do you have a better idea?"

He smiled and leaned back on his elbows. "Yeah."

Shaila jumped to her feet and nearly sent me flying. She backed away and I could smell her alarm. "It's making sense now," she whispered. And yes, all at once, it was. The clothes, the shave, the jaw line. Henry Wheeler stood up.

She took her knife from her back pocket and held it out. "You're a pimp." He walked toward her. "Get the fuck away." She jabbed her knife at the air. He stopped, raised both hands.

"I'm not a pimp," he said. His hands dropped to his sides. "Do I look like a pimp?"

She kept her knife raised. "I'm not going anywhere with you until you tell me what the fuck you're doing here."

He raised his arms to the sky again. "I'm a grad student. Okay? I'm a grad student."

"Fuck you," she said, and we meant it.

* * *

Henry the grad student took us back to his apartment that night. We walked from Telegraph up through campus, its buildings lit from the ground like old monuments. We walked past the big clocktower as it chimed midnight. We got on a bus that took us high up into the hills, to a neighborhood of steeply sloped driveways and houses with fairy-tale turrets. I watched Shaila strip off her clothes and get in the shower. "Oh my god," she said, letting the hot water flatten her hair to her shoulders in great black sheets. I scooted into an open cabinet and relieved myself. Henry lived in what he called an in-law. A house in which humans keep their elders.

What kept Shaila from running? Back to the group, back to what she knew? I'd like to say it was intuition—I know my own had settled. I didn't like the man, but he didn't have the predator in him. Most likely, it was the thought of one more night on Telegraph, waking at every footfall, fingers wrapped around her knife. She might have gone anywhere that night. She might have trusted anyone.

* * *

Out of the shower, Shaila stood before the mirror, gazing into it as the steam cleared. Droplets of water poured from her hair down her naked legs. I'm not sure what she was looking for when she slid a finger over her clavicle, traced circles over the round knob of her shoulder. I'd started to fall asleep in the warm womb of that room when we heard a knock on the door.

"Hey." The grad student. "You all right in there?" A pause. "No drugs. Okay?"

Shaila did not answer. Slowly, she put on her old dirty clothes, covering that hot, clean skin with the filth of Telegraph Avenue.

When she opened the bathroom door again, Henry had gone. On the floor were a pair of soft gray pants and a plaid shirt, neatly folded. Shaila tore her old clothes off for the new. She scooped me up and placed me in her flannel chest pocket. Through its cloth I could feel the shower's residual warmth, the small mountain of her nipple.

I stuck my head out. Henry had a real kitchen with a microwave and a bowl of apples on the counter. He had a kitchen table overtaken by a computer and stacks of paper. We sat on the sofa and watched him type frantically, as if he'd forgotten Shaila was there. A bus passed. Its headlights flashed through the window.

"Where are we?" she asked. He looked up, dazed. "What part of Berkeley is this?"

"Kensington. North. Way up." He picked up a metal mug and sipped from it.

"What's with you and that mug?" she asked.

He looked at it, shrugged. "It's my travel mug. It's no-spill. Insulated. It's extremely expensive."

Shaila scoffed.

He stood up then, but didn't move from the table. "You won't steal anything, will you?"

"If I wanted to steal something, I'd steal it."

He stood by his computer, processing this.

"I won't steal anything," she said. "Asshole."

He straightened some papers on his desk, tapped them, looked out the window, at this moonless void called Kensington. He was much less sure of himself, now that she was actually in his house.

He disappeared into a back room and came out with a stack of blankets. "The sofa's yours."

"Where's your roommate?"

"I don't have one."

She looked at the bay window, the spacious living room, the hardwood floors.

"Rent control," he said.

She peered out the window. "The main house? Is that rented out too?"

"The owner lives there. Skye."

She considered this. "I wonder when she bought the place. It's probably worth about a million now. Do you think she has a mortgage?"

"You ask a lot of questions about real estate."

She shrugged. "Bay Area kid."

* * *

Shaila made a bed on the sofa and turned to him. "Thank you," she said. "You didn't have to do this."

"I know. You're welcome." He smiled. "Good night."

"Good night."

"Sleep well." He turned and left.

"Wait!" she called.

"Yeah?"

"I have a knife. Touch me and I'll kill you."

"Okay." His bedroom door clicked shut.

Shaila pulled open her pocket.

"Hey you," she said.

"Hello."

"You'd better stay hidden, my friend. Grad student doesn't know about you."

"I realize that."

She stood up and searched the corners, tiptoed into the kitchen, and opened, silently, a cupboard under the sink. "What do you think?" I hopped from her pocket and poked my head into the cupboard. I could hear the scratch and scuttle of rodent life. Mice. I could smell them.

She sighed. "I know. It's small. I'm sorry."

"It seems cold," I said. "I'm not sure."

"Okay. One night. In my pocket. And you'll get up before sunrise and get into this cupboard before anyone sees you. Okay?"

"Yes. Yes."

"You can get up that early?"

"Absolutely."

I didn't know how tired I was until Shaila lay down, grew still, and I could finally snuggle into the curve of her breast. Fatigue heaved me over its shoulder and I sank down and down, until it seemed I was upside down, eyes shut, the night somersaulting around me.

* * *

I first met Shaila at the Lothlorien co-op on the south side of campus. It had been a week since I'd left my home high in the rafters of a church. So far, no one had noticed me. You have to look down if you're going to see me, and not a lot of people look down. I would have stayed there a good long while, I think, if I hadn't met Shaila.

That particular afternoon, I had climbed atop the fridge. I hate heights. No. Hate is the wrong word. High places invoke nausea, dizziness, the hot breath of my own demise. But someone had left a cinnamon bun up there. I will do almost anything for a cinnamon bun.

I'd eaten my fill of the pastry, my gut wailing against its seams, when I heard Shaila enter. I glanced down and nearly fainted from the vertigo. I must have made a sound because she looked straight at me. She didn't scream or whack at me with a broom. She gazed up for a very long time, her eyes squinting, nose twitching high in the air. Then she dragged a chair over, climbed onto it, and lifted me into her palm.

"Hi," was all she said.

"Hi," I answered.

"What're you doing up there?" And I liked that she didn't call me little buddy or little fella. She spoke to me like she respected me. "Are you a rat or a mouse?"

"I'm a rat."

She nodded. "Not a bad place for a rat." She stroked my head with one finger, just between my ears, and I fell relentlessly in love.

Shaila was brown like me but browner, human brown and so much bigger, with long black hair, tied that day into a swirl resembling the crown of a cinnamon bun. She slipped me into the front breast pocket of her jacket, a soft and dark home, redolent of rosemary. Eventually, I would chew a small slit in the fabric, a porthole to the world.

"I'm not supposed to be here either," she whispered. She opened the fridge and from the blast of cold she grabbed a plastic container. As an afterthought, she leaped up and grabbed for the bun.

"Please don't jump like that," I called. "It's very jarring for me."

"I got you a little something too, Lothlorien."

And now you know my name.

* * *

It was almost morning when I woke. Out on Telegraph, this was always the safest hour, when the street slept and cars were rare. In an hour or two, storefront grates would rattle open. Trucks would make their deliveries. Street vendors would set up card tables stacked with beaded necklaces and T-shirts.

Outside the window: a leafy vine, a lavender sky. Across the courtyard stood the main house, ivory-walled with a tiled roof, a majestic aloe plant beside its door. The fog had stayed away that morning, and the house bathed in sunlight.

I crawled from Shaila's pocket to the kitchen. No feet to be seen. No grad student. In the living room, I found a small hole and slipped into it. I could see from there, at least. I would not spend this life in a cupboard.

Soon after, Henry shuffled into the kitchen and brewed some coffee. The smell did not wake Shaila. She'd learned on the street to sleep hard when she could. He poured his coffee into his metallic mug, gazed at Shaila's sleeping form, and left. She and I would spend that day indoors, watching television and eating toast. The house was heat and light. I would never again feel her so at peace.

Henry came home in the late afternoon. At the sound of his key in the door, Shaila hissed and I ran for my hole. He bounded in, smiling wide, a stack of paper in his arms.

"Hey, honey," she said flatly. "How was your day?"

He spread his papers over the dining table. "Decent. How was yours?"

They made dinner together, chatting easily, like roommates. I'd never seen Shaila like this: stepping lightly in bare feet, laughing and kicking him gently in the shins. Henry poured her a glass of wine, but stopped before he handed it over. "How old are you?"

"Nineteen."

"Old enough," he said, and poured himself a glass.

* * *

They had finished dinner, two heaping plates of pasta with red sauce and meatballs, when Henry asked, "Can I interview you? Would you mind?" He flicked his hair from his eyes and grabbed a pencil and notebook. "I'd love a woman's perspective."

Shaila sat down at the kitchen table. She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. Softly, she spoke of leaving home, of finding her way from a town called Larkspur to her perch on Telegraph Avenue. She talked about the thrill of those first days that stretched as long and warm as a South Berkeley sidewalk—finding herself among people who sought no one's approval but their own, who could live without the material frippery of the life she'd come from. She spoke of the Telegraph sidewalk and Telegraph sleeping bags, the Telegraph men and the Telegraph feet endlessly tromping by. At a certain point, Henry stopped writing and simply watched her. When a strand of hair fell to her face, he reached out and slid it back behind her ear. She stopped talking. His hand stayed there, cradling the high curve of her neck. Her mouth opened slightly, silently. He kissed her.

They stood and he led her to his bedroom. The house smelled of something new, at once animal and familiar and deeply unsettling. I hopped onto the table, my stomach pumping, my head in a frenzy. I climbed atop a stack of paper and read. A title: "Anarchist Movements Among Northern Californian Homeless Populations." I hunkered down and relieved myself. A trail of piss, a scatter of pellets. Eat your pheasant, drink your wine. Your days are numbered, bourgeois swine.

What is it to watch someone you love fall in love with someone else? I bore no illusions about Shaila. I knew who I was. I knew who she was. And yet, to watch her watch him. Her hand on his shoulder. To watch her lie, for hours sometimes, in a nest of blankets, her eyes locked on his, those turbulent pools fallen still, her tight stony shoulders grown soft. Run, Lothlorien, I told myself. Leave her here. She's happy now. She doesn't need you anymore.

But I couldn't. I did find a tunnel from the in-law to the back garden, where I could sneak into the main house for bread and cookies and fruit. It was risky, moving out in the open like that, but I had little left to lose.

* * *

A few weeks later: a knock at the door. Henry emerged from his room in a kimono. I hadn't seen Shaila for hours and hours. On the porch stood an old woman, her mop of hair, glasses. She held up a brown paper bag.

"Little fuckers!" she said. "I have a rat. Do you have a rat? I have a rat. I was putting away an old coat yesterday when I opened the door to a closet full of turds. Did you know about this?"

"Yeah. I found some droppings too." Henry pressed the sleep from his eyes, ruffled his hair, and yawned.

She looked him up and down. "So you know that if you got one rat, you've got a colony. That's what they say. One moves in and the rest follow." She pointed to the ceiling. "Ever hear their little feet on the roof? Scraping sounds? That's them. Little toenails." She thrust the bag at him. "I brought you some poison and a trap."

Shaila emerged from the bedroom wearing nothing but Henry's shirt. She stood behind him. The old woman's eyebrows jumped.

"Skye, this is Shaila. My girlfriend."

Shaila raised a hand in a shy wave.

"Uh-huh," Skye muttered. "Well, I'll leave you to it. Get that trap set, hear? PayDay bars. That's what they say." The woman left.

"Was that her?" Shaila asked.

"Yes, indeed," Henry said, pulling a trap out of the bag. "Skye Wasserman. Ex-hippie. Beloved companion to Janis Joplin. Debtless owner of a million-dollar home." He held the trap up. It was gray, with a thick metal U-bar. He reached into the bag again and pulled out a plastic parcel. "Rat poison," he said, peering at the package. "Strychnine. Wow. How old is this stuff?"

"I doubt it's legal," Shaila said.

"Strychnine could kill a human."

"Well, only a human dumb enough to eat strychnine." She grinned. "Darwinism. Right?"

But Henry didn't respond. He was staring through her, past her, into a flicker of possibility.

* * *

After we see Henry at the Inn Kensington, he won't leave Shaila alone. His name flashes on her phone three, four times a day. Each time it does, I tell her not to answer. And each time, she answers. She picks up where she leaves off. Yelling. Crying. Pleading.

Here's what Henry and Shaila were fighting about that morning in the diner. Here's what could bring her world crashing down:

When Skye left, Henry set the trap and placed it in the corner of the living room. He didn't have a PayDay bar, so he smeared some almond butter on the little tray. If he thought I'd fall for that nonsense, he was sorely mistaken. A rat doesn't die in a trap unless he wants to.

Shaila ran a hand down Henry's arm. She scanned the room for me, but I'd hidden myself well. She kissed his shoulder, pressed her face into his chest, and I knew. I was losing her completely.

* * *

Skye Wasserman came back the next afternoon. "Any luck with the trap?"

Henry opened the door wide. "Come in!" he said. "No luck yet. It should take a day or two." He led Skye into the living room.

Shaila was there, wearing real clothes this time. "Can I offer you some tea?" Good Indian girl. She made her way to the kitchen before Skye could answer. "We only have green, I'm afraid," she called.

"Green's good," Skye said, then turned to Henry. "She's not living here, is she?"

"No, no." They sat on the sofa. "Just . . . you know." He grinned.

"Young love," Skye said.

Henry's laugh brought my vertigo back.

"How's the dissertation coming along?"

Shaila emerged with a steaming mug. She sat next to Henry, wove her fingers through his. The two of them watched Skye Wasserman, millionaire hippie landlord, take her first sip of tea.

* * *

Skye slurped the last of her tea and slapped her knees. "Time for this old hag to shove off," she said. "Leave you young lovers to it."

"Let me walk you back, Skye," Henry said. His hands shook as he stood.

I looked at Shaila, whose eyes darted from Henry to Skye, Skye to Henry.

"Well," Skye said, placing a hand on Henry's arm, "aren't you a gentleman. Normally I'd say no, but today . . ." She held her hand up, turned it from side to side. "I'm not quite myself today."

"Let's get you to bed, Skye," Henry said, his voice silken. "It's probably something seasonal."

Thirty minutes later, Henry returned. He stepped through the door, collapsed to his knees, and rolled into a ball.

Quietly, Shaila kneeled beside him. "You did it."

He nodded into his knees and let out a moan.

"How did you do it?" she asked.

For the first time, I felt for him. He lay there for a long while, Shaila rubbing his back. He didn't move. Shaila sat beside him with her hands on her knees. Minutes passed, Shaila on all fours now, her head hanging, her impatience flooding the room.

Finally, she reached out and grabbed him by the square chin. "Tell me how you did it, Henry."

So Henry told her. Skye Wasserman had started fainting, collapsing, by the time they reached her living room. The poison was working, but he wanted to be sure. He said it three times. I just wanted to be sure, Shaila. We needed to be sure. So he took a throw pillow and pressed it to the old lady's face until she stopped breathing, until her poisoned limbs stopped jerking, until her smothered screams fell silent.

"What do we do now?" Shaila asked. Henry looked up, eyes red and hollow. He wiped his nose with his sleeve.

Reader, they threw her in the bay.

Skye Wasserman had no children, no family. Henry had made sure of this. She'd fully paid off her home. She had no job, no one who would miss her. Hers was the classic tale of the wealthy old spinster, poisoned and smothered by a graduate student, his homeless girlfriend, and her undercover pet rat.

* * *

Shaila and Henry moved into the main house a few days later. They didn't move any of their furniture. Even Henry's clothes stayed in his closet. "We don't want to raise suspicions," he said. "Neighbors notice the strangest things."

So Henry and Shaila played house. Shaila cooked dinners on a six-burner stove and Henry cleared up, loading the dishwasher, wiping down the granite countertops, sweeping a broom over Spanish tiles. Henry made coffee in the mornings—never tea. In the in-law, the rat trap with its almond butter grew dusty. I could hear mice in the walls still, and now and then I thought of joining them. But, well, me and high places.

I made myself comfortable in the in-law. Shaila got a job at Pegasus Books. "It feels good to be making my own money," she said to me one day. "I'm doing it, Lothlorien. I can finally afford the Bay Area." She smiled wide and real, like she believed what she was saying.

For a few months, we lived a good life. I'd spend the days roaming the Kensington hills, thick with succulents, with overhanging oaks and redwoods. I'd nestle into rocks that drank in the day's warmth. In the evenings, I'd return to the in-law, watching the main house through my window. Some nights Shaila would stop in and see me. Some nights she would not. But soon—humans are such predictable creatures—the fighting began. Shaila's cries drifted across the yard. Henry's shouts were hard and cold as iron beams. Often he'd push her out their front door, Shaila reeling backward, catching herself on the patio railing.

When I think back, it's hard to pinpoint when exactly the changes began. I can't help but think it started a few weeks after the big move. (This is what Shaila called it, whenever she referred to the terrible death of Skye Wasserman. The big move.) Here was the first sign: I was alone one night in the in-law unit, asleep on the sofa. Through the silence of my midnight kitchen, I heard a scraping. And then a thunderous snap. It echoed through the empty house.

"It's the trap," I said aloud, to no one. I ran to the corner of the house and stopped. A screech, unmistakable.

A shift in the moonlight and there she was, a female mouse the color of dryer lint. Her head sat centimeters from the curl of almond butter, her neck nearly flattened beneath the U-bar. I hadn't thought about the trap in months. The almond butter had fogged over with dust and I couldn't have imagined another creature finding it. This one did. She was small. Her eyes, solid black, bulged from their sockets. The bar was supposed to flip and kill instantly, Henry had said. That's what made the trap humane.

The mouse struggled, managed to drag the trap a few inches along the hardwood floor. And then she stopped. With each panting breath, her small body swelled and receded. At last, she sighed. Her eyes rolled up to look into mine.

"I'm sorry," I said. "I'm sorry."

The mouse grew still, released a stream of urine. The yellow liquid trailed to the edge of a floorboard and ran in a rivulet along its seam.

Shaila came to me later that evening, her body shaking even before she saw the mouse. When she did see her, she cried out, picked me up, and held me to her cheek, where I could taste saltwater trails. "Lothlorien," she whispered.

Henry burst through the door and I scurried into her pocket. "Fuck," he said, crouching by the trap. "Well. Let's get rid of it." He turned to Shaila. "What's the matter with you?"

From her pocket, I watched him fiddle with the U-bar, curse quietly, then pick up the trap, the mouse's body drooping off its edge. At the outside garbage can, he threw them both in, trap and body together.

Shaila stayed in the in-law with me that evening. "I'm sorry you had to see that," she said.

"Thank you for staying with me."

She ran a finger between my ears. "I don't know where he's gone. He's gone all the time now. I think he's seeing someone else." I rested a paw on her finger. "He can see whoever he wants," she sighed. "I'm not going anywhere. I'm not letting him go."

I won't ever understand humans.

A week later, Henry pushed Shaila out their door again. This time, he threw after her an assortment of her belongings—a few shirts she'd managed to buy over the months, a pair of jeans, a phone.

Shaila found me in the in-law. She cried in great racking sobs, on her knees, holding her stomach. She cried until she could barely breathe, and all I could do was watch, my paw on her foot.

Dusk turned to night. "Can we leave now?" I asked.

She picked up her phone and dialed. "Papa," she said, "come get me? I want to come home."

* * *

It's been a year since we left Henry's house. A good year. Shaila's at Berkeley City College now. She wants to finish in three years and go for an MBA. She's been back home, living with her parents. There was no stepdad. Only Mummy and Papa, mild-mannered doctors, bewildered and terrified by her absence, ecstatic to have her home. Mummy would quite happily send me to the sewers, but Shaila keeps me safe in a cage in her bedroom, slips me into her pocket whenever she leaves the house. I've been auditing her classes on the sly, absorbing what I can of macroeconomics and Tolstoy.

* * *

It's a late Saturday afternoon. The mist has not burned off, but hangs low and heavy over the hills. Shaila and I are on a bus, winding up those old familiar streets. In the in-law, Henry waits.

"Hi!" He's breathless and bright-eyed when he opens the door. I search behind him for the willowy form of the new woman, but she is nowhere. "We're alone," he says.

I can feel the sad heave of Shaila's chest, the thump of her battered heart. Henry places a hand on her chin, lifts it, and they kiss.

But it's only a kiss, as they say, and a few minutes later, Henry's in the kitchen, filling the water kettle. I jump from Shaila's pocket. "Lothlorien!" she hisses. I find my old hiding spot. In the distance, the kettle rumbles to a boil.

Henry is still determined to talk about the murder, at least with his therapist, and Shaila pleads for his silence. He's already told his acupuncturist, he says, and Shaila shrieks and shoves him in the chest. With a single hand, he shoves her back and sends her tumbling off the sofa.

Then he gets up, moves to the kitchen, and fills Shaila's mug with water and a tea bag. He pulls his own Extremely Expensive Travel Mug out of the cupboard, and fills that up as well.

"I plan to head to the police station today," he says. "If I have to serve time, I'm okay with that. If they trace things back to you, well, I'm sorry. I'm sorry for that."

Shaila's head sinks into her hands. She sits there, silent. I want to be with her.

Sometimes, an old rat gets a new idea. It seems, initially, like a very good idea, and eventually, like the only possible idea. As the tea steeps and the argument continues, this old rat climbs atop the fridge—the height is staggering, but I close my eyes and smell for what I need. And there it is. Still there, that old bag of poison.

Thank goodness for the precious materialism of the bourgeoisie. I rustle a strychnine pellet from the bag and drop it in his Extremely Expensive Travel Mug. He will die today, this man so adept at throwing away the bodies of women, this man so ready to ruin Shaila's life.

I watch from my high perch, my nerves writhing. Henry takes the two mugs back to the sofa, and it occurs to me that he just might give Shaila his travel mug. The thought sends me squealing. He looks up, suddenly alert. Shaila pulls at his hand.

"Hey," she says.

"I thought I heard something." He takes her hand. "The thing is, Shaila, I've learned a lot about accountability. Cynthia—she's taught me a lot. We're in therapy together—"

"You're in therapy? Together? You've been together how long?"

"Our relationship has been fast, yes. It's been very intense. But it feels right." His eyes shine with certainty as he picks up—I shudder with gratitude—his very own travel mug.

He drinks the tea down in a long, glorious slurp.

"Does she know about me?" Shaila asks.

"She does not."

She should be relieved but instead she looks hurt.

"But she'll stay with me if they put me away. She's promised." That's when he peers into the mug. "Holy shit," he says. He gasps and gags.

Shaila watches him. She doesn't know.

"You put something in here," he says. "What did you do?" He bends over and tries to vomit but can't.

"What are you talking about?"

"You did this!" He lunges at her now, grabs her by the throat. I leap from the fridge, shrieking. Shaila lifts a boot and kicks him in the chest. He falls to the ground.

I run at him. I will tear him apart. He looks down, sees me, and squeals. He leaps onto the couch and scurries behind Shaila, who is holding her throat, gagging for air. "Run," she croaks. And I do.

I am nowhere now. And everywhere. Isn't that the rodent's way?

"Look," she says, her voice hoarse. I can no longer see her. "Give me your mug. I'll drink it myself. There's nothing in there." I know the sound of Shaila sipping. That's how well I know her. I hear that sound.

"Shaila," Henry says. Rats know the rasp of death. We know it in our bones.

I step out of my hiding place and watch Henry, who looks so very sorry now.

"Shaila," he says again, and collapses to the floor. Shaila gapes at him, picks up the travel mug, and drops it like it's scalded her.

When she sees me, she knows. "You. What did you do?" Her eyes grow wide.

I must hurry now. I run to the fridge, leap to the top, not even noticing the height, and I push the bag of strychnine to its edge.

She looks at it, looks at me, then holds her throat. "Oh god," she says. She runs from the house.

"Wait!" I run out after her.

The ambulance finds Shaila rolled into a ball on the sidewalk. She's managed to stumble half a block before falling to her knees. They load her onto a stretcher. They do not see me. "Lothlorien," she gasps as they lift her aboard. But I'm too slow. The ambulance doors slam shut, and I have to let her go. It's for the best, I think. A hospital is no place for a rat.

* * *

Eventually, they find Henry, dead on the floor of the in-law. A quiet graduate student, clothes in his closet, a typically bare fridge, an unfinished thesis, a clear suicide. Both houses are empty now. Even the mice are gone. Shaila will know to find me here, and so I wait among my hardwood floors, my Spanish tiles, my granite countertops.

But a rat needs a home. My homing instinct is strong, though I won't go back to my family. Mine didn't even bother naming me. I was standard issue Rattus norvegicus until the day I met Shaila. I left home because my family lived high up in the rafters of the church and I, with my vertigo, couldn't move or think or breathe up there. It's a wonder I managed to leave at all. It was my sister who led me, eyes closed, mouth clamped around her tail, from our rafter down a drainage pipe and onto safe ground. On the ground, I felt like myself, for maybe the first time. On the ground, I could move, I could run, I could leave.

Why do people leave the homes they know? Sometimes, simply to live.

Shaila is my home now. Without her, I am a refugee. Four hundred beats a minute, and I count every one. In the main house, I find a hole so dark and tight a human wouldn't know it existed. It is my own penitential cave, in which I wait for her, in which I repeat to myself the only thought possible: She is alive. It was only a sip. Shaila will be back for me soon.