by Sarah Porter
It gets late, but my mom and Zach never come home. Eventually I fall asleep right where I am, many-jointed legs from the wall cuddling me in a fidgety cocoon.
* * *
When I wake the light is brick-tinted Vaseline. Tendrils and cilia, pincers and quills, nudge and investigate me on all sides. The view is familiar, if blurred: my same old neighborhood in Queens, with its bodegas and the Armenian restaurant on the corner. It takes me a long moment to understand: I’ve been pulled inside the wall. The creatures have considerately pierced a narrow passage to the outside so I can breathe, but I’m finding it hard to move.
“Hey, guys?” I say in English. “You know you have to let me out by evening, don’t you? I’m the guest of honor at the rats’ spring ball tonight!”
There’s no response, so I try it again in ratspeak; not that these are rats, but maybe one of them was trained as a diplomat or something. Still no reaction. I’m getting hungry and I need to pee.
I switch to kicking and flailing. All it does is make the wall jiggle.
I can see our furniture, suspended like me in a giant block of slime. I guess the rooms have all collapsed. There’s a constellation of diamond shapes above me and after a pause I realize they must be tiles from our upstairs bathroom, with the bathtub hovering in their midst.
A few minutes later, I notice a shift in the view. The whole house has started to crawl.
* * *
Our progress is sluggish. I drift in and out of queasy sleep until sunset, when a sharp change of angle wakes me. The house has compressed itself into a sloppy baguette and begun oozing down the subway stairs. I find myself tipped nearly upside down. A pair of lobstery claws grips me tenderly by the ankles, holding me high enough that my head doesn’t smack the steps.
We appear to have picked up one or two more human passengers—accidentally, no doubt—but I’m not sure the creatures in here have extended them the courtesy of air holes. I hear dim screams as our dense medium splits around the turnstiles and re-congeals on the other side, see hazy forms rushing away from us. With an immense squelching the house pours itself onto the tracks.
It’s so kind of our home to bring me here! And just in time for the ball! I suppose I’m not looking my freshest, but now that I think about it a little grime is probably the fashionable thing. I wouldn’t want to look like I was trying too hard.
We plow up the tunnel, wrenched signal lights and ruptured tracks in our wake. It starts to get very dark.
* * *
“Hi,” sings a thin voice in my ear. “Welcome to the ball, Ivan. We’ve met before, by the way, but you didn’t ask my name then, and I won’t be telling you now.” I think I recognize the lilting of the mother rat, the one whose baby I saved; she must have dug her way in here. Now she should be happy to see me.
“Good evening!” I sing, trying not to sound too excited. “I’m happy to be here. But, uh, I might need help getting out of the, um, house?”
“Nah,” she trills. “Think of it as a venue change. You’ll be staying right where you are. We’re the ones who will be dancing, thanks. And—wow, there’s no tactful way to say this, is there?—you should know we’ve decided against eating you.”
“Eating me?” I say, startled back into English. It’s so utterly dark down here that, I don’t know, maybe sound waves can’t carry properly. “Um, why not?”
“Well, it is traditional. At the end of the ball, we devour the guest of honor. And a lot of us thought we should carry on as usual. But then we’d be basically eating the ratspeak inside you, and that made a lot of us squicky. Also, nobody really wanted to do the three-generations-of-luck for your family thing. Under the circumstances.”
“I see.” I have enough self-possession back that I manage to sing it, though not nearly as well as when I was practicing. I’m thinking fast.
“But we are totally okay with letting your house spit you out in front of an oncoming train. And if things that aren’t us happen to eat you afterwards, then that’s their problem.”
“You mean like roaches?” I squeal. Is that how they treat a maestro among ratspeakers?
I can’t see the rat at all, but I can feel a calculating flick of her whiskers. “Disgusting, right? But, you know, we might still be open to a trade.”
“A trade,” I sing, mulling it over. I guess knowing ratspeak hasn’t done me a lot of good. “Maybe.”
“Like, we could save your life, send you home, and put everything back the way it was before you had the presumption to go sticking your paws where they don’t belong? How’s that for a deal? We’ll even throw in some extra good luck for your mom, and make your brother kind of frog-faced. You did rescue my baby, and even if you did it for grossly selfish reasons that’s worth something. Doesn’t that sound fantastic?”
I sigh. Even after everything we’ve been through together, the rats still don’t understand me. I have a vision now of the wild, wild waltz: of my hand in paw after paw after paw. Of how I’ll stay with them, with all of them, more deeply than I’d ever dared imagine. And the only roadblock is the secret language lilting inside me? It’s amazing how something that seemed so important can turn out to be negotiable. “I’m not trading my ratspeak for that. That’s got nothing to do with what I want.”
“Oh, no?” she sings. Ever so sweetly. Her tiny pink tongue flicks at her lips; she sniffs at me and smiles. “No, Ivan, really?”
About the Author
SARAH PORTER is the author of the Lost Voices Trilogy (Lost Voices,Waking Storms, The Twice Lost) in addition to Vassa in the Night—all for the teen audience. For over ten years she has taught creative writing workshops in New York City public schools to students in grades K-10. Porter also works as a VJ, both solo and with the art collective Fort/Da; she has played venues including Roseland, Galapagos, Tonic, Joe’s Pub, The Hammerstein Ballroom, The Nokia Theater, and the Burning Man festival. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two cats. You can sign up for email updates here.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Begin Reading
About the Author
Copyright
Copyright © 2016 by Sarah Porter
Art copyright © 2016 by Anna & Elena Balbusso
