Whisper House Press

Rat

by HFJ Ballard

Teeth brushed, jammies donned, stories read. Bedtime routine complete, Mr. Jayworthy of Jayworthy & Co. put his three daughters in three beds, kissing each on the head.

“Daddy,” the youngest daughter said. “Why does the rat play the piano every night?”

Her father shuddered. “The rat?” he asked, left eye twitching ever so slightly.

“In the drawing room.”

“Of course it would be in the drawing room,” he said. “That’s where the piano is.”

“But why does he play the piano?”

“Who?”

“The rat.”

The girl’s father shuddered again. “Couldn’t you say it was a mouse?” he asked.

“No,” the youngest daughter replied.

“Why not?”

“Because it’s a rat.”

“Perhaps a very large mouse?” her father said, glancing toward the door.

“It’s not a mouse,” the daughter said. “It’s a rat.”

“How do you know?”

“Because of the song.”

“Song? What song?”

The little girl took a child-sized breath and sang in a warbling, minor tone:

When the rat man plays his tune, then come we into your room. Gobble you up and slurp you down. One two three, we walk around. Loved ones never know the truth of what has happened to their youth. One two three, and one’s away, here but gone, and gone to stay. Upside, downside, inside out. They never shout, they never shout. One and two, there’s just one left. Tomorrow night, our final theft. Come quietly into the night. Come quietly into the night.

The silence following her song scratched at the dark corners of the room.

“Well, there you have it,” her father said, each syllable pushing itself through molasses and tripping on the uptake. “It’s not a rat at all, but a rat man.”

“Is that very different?”

“Is that…. Where did you hear all this, anyway?” the girl’s father asked.

“The shadows.” The youngest daughter looked toward the far wall, past her sisters who were sitting on their respective beds, staring at nothing.

Their father looked in that direction as well.

The two older girls were statuesque, did not explain their sister’s fantasies—did not even move their matching midnight eyes.

“I think you need more sleep,” the man said. He kissed his youngest daughter once more on the forehead and fled the room with hesitantly lurching steps.

The lights clicked off, the shadows advanced to take its place.

In the drawing room, a creature that might have been a rat and might have been a man sat at the old Steinway & Sons piano, roughly laying tombstone-grey claws on scuffed keys.

In the room, the shadows did a marionette dance past two empty beds.

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HFJ Ballard is an eclectic writer from what was once rural Utah. He is the author of the novel Monster and the creator of the comic Miles to Go. Ballard believes that there is no meaning deeper than a moment of beauty without purpose.