richard_

BOOOOOOOOM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Barked the thunder as lightning crackled outside overhead. Causing the hairs on his neck to jump up, and go running around bumping into each other screaming silently in fright. It had been raining continuously now for thirty-seven days and thirty-eight nights. And there wasnt anything even remotely close to an end of it in sight. Most people had welcomed the rains when they first started over a month ago today. But just like everyone else old enough to remember how bad things could often times get, he had learned to dread the rains while growing up as a terrified child deep within the subways far below. Cause with the rains come floods Was the saying his grandmother had all too often told him as a boy. and with the floods come rats, and with the rats She so always loved to tease. always came death!
But grandma. He could almost hear himself asking the old woman shyly all those years ago.
Yes my lovie? She had whispered as she helped his mother clean the dishes from the table where they had all just recently ate, and he still sat. All the while, smiling in that strange unsettling way she always did. As if somehow already knowing, and quite obviously longing for, what she knew he was about to ask.
if the rats bring death He mumbled as best he could. Frightened as he had all too often been by the way the candle light somehow always seemed to avoid the touch of his grandmothers heavily lined face, and suddenly sickened by the memory of what he had just so eagerly stuffed himself with at lunch. then why do we eat them so much?
Because my darling She smiled, looking up at him from across the table with those eerily glowing, hazel green eyes. if we didnt eat the rats She purred as her smile grew impossibly large, filling the room as well as his heart with the dreadfully ancient smell of her already dead, or soon to be dying breath. then we would have eaten all the children, including you, a very very long time ago.