Rat, the place where she lives and everything are the products of my own diseased mind and as such belong to me.  All mine…for me and no amount of therapy can stop it!  Mwahahaa!  Please R &R…I need the feedback for better or worse!

Rat was bored.

Worse than that…

Rat was bored and lonely.

She had been in the place for almost two weeks now and in that time had met plenty of nice people, but no one like her…Well…plenty of people like her in the sense that they liked to eat out of garbage and drink stupid amounts of alcohol in the bar that…joy of joys…smelled like a dumpster!

No….

No one like her.

They were all…stuck. That’s the only way to describe it. Stuck in one shape.  They didn’t know what it was like to feel the tingle of the breeze blowing through your fur, or to wag your tail so much that it ached.  They were all bald.  Nice, but bald.  And she couldn’t tell them anything.

“You have to go,” They’d said.  “Get some experience of the outside world!”  They’d said…”Life doesn’t begin and end on this plain”  And when she’d suggested the mountains instead, they’d just looked at her in one of those ways. And then they played the trump card…”It’s what your father always wanted”. 

‘That’s it…when you want me to do something, always play the dad card and off I trot’ She thought as she made her way through the wilderness where she grew up, out of the villages towards unfamiliar, concrete territory.

“Now remember…stay in that shape,” They’d said as they dusted off and adjusted the enormous blue sweater and the jeans they’d given her to wear.  “And make sure you eat…” They looked her up and down  “But not too much…and remember what we told you about money…and shops…” Rat nodded as the information was delivered to her by a hoard of well meaning friends and surrogate parents.  She was still nodding as she had swung the bag with her few possessions onto her back and walked down the valley until everything she held dear was out of sight. 

A few sunsets came and went and soon the place hove into view like a carbuncle.  Rat stood on the brow of a hill and watched the chlorine sunrise.  She rooted in a pocket and produced a piece of paper that one of her family had kindly presented her with before she left.  “Show them this” They’d said  “They’ll sort you out…just look for the big sign.”  She traced the top line of the letter with her finger and her lips moved as she read ‘St. David’s Hostel’ She shook her head and sighed, rammed the thing back into her pocket and trudged on into the nose bursting mess that was to be her home for the next however long.

Her feet hurt.  The concrete beneath her feet and the unfamiliar trainers made her feet feel like they were being strangled.  She considered throwing them away, then looked at the mess that concealed the street, took the executive decision to choose life and keep the hated foot covers on for now.  Then, she smelled the most wonderful thing she had ever encountered in her short but moderately eventful life…

It was coming from that thing there…

The green thing…made of that shiny stuff…

With a black lid on….

A man had just tipped something in it from a bucket.  She looked around and edged down the alley.  She pushed the lid of the dumpster back and it rumbled away from her, releasing the wonderful smell of food.  She dove into the treasure trove and started to dig around in the boxes, letting the lid slide over her.  After she had eaten an amount of food that no one of her stature should have been able to shift, she fell asleep and dreamt of dragons.

The next morning she was woken by an angry man wearing nominally white clothing who was swearing at her in a language she couldn’t understand.  In addition to this, he had thrown a bucket of vegetable peelings on her head, which frankly she could live with, but the shouting was beginning to hurt her ears.  She climbed out, trying her best to shut off the sound of the man and trudged off down the alley.  In the fine spirit of these situations, it began to rain.

Her thick, curly hair soaked up the water like a sponge and decanted it neatly down her nose, which made her sneeze.  She started to shiver and wished she could take on her other shape. The one that would be warm, the one with thick fur that would make the water run off before it reached her skin.  But no… they said not to…”They won’t understand”  they’d said  “You’ll be put in a zoo” they’d said…She sighed, blowing another drip off her nose as she did so.  She stood in the alley and felt her knitted sweater sink past her knees with the weight of the water. 

Why was she here again? 

Oh yeah…to learn stuff….

Bugger that.

She squelched around the city until it got dark and found another heavenly, and blissfully shouting man free, dumpster and settled in for the night.

And so two weeks had passed.

She’d discovered bars.  She’d also discovered that she was rather good at finding money for said bars due to steely determination and an enhanced sense of smell.  You could just find the stuff lying on the streets!  After a day’s looking, you could sometimes find enough for a drink.  And if you got talking to people, which she was good at since she would chat to a dead mouse full of maggots if it looked like it had life in it, she often got drinks for her. 

The people were very nice and all, and she’d even made a couple of friends who like sleeping in dumpsters too.  But they just weren’t quite right…

She’d made friends with a couple of dogs who hung round the dumpsters too.  It was impossible to hide what she was from them, as the nose never lies.  She’d helped them out with food and they’d overcome some of their initial suspicion and given her the friendly advice of getting herself a collar.  A few days hanging around the shopping street should do that…her ears could pick up the sound of a coin being dropped from yards away.  She was in her dumpster considering this when she heard someone walking down the alley.