A Tail of Two Cities

“Well now, ya cocky Whippersnapper, what makes ya think dis ere alley ain’t good nuff for ye?” the old rat asked. He was large with angular pink limbs and greasy grey fur that stuck out in tufty tufts all over. He leaned over his fat round white belly while gnawing on a toothpick stained with barbeque sauce and was nose to nose with one of his 436 grandchildren.

Whippersnapper stood defiantly, black whiskers bristling, pink paws fisted so tightly his sharp little claws drew pinpricks of blood in his palms. “Grampy, you’re down to 129 grandchildren. There’s more cats creeping into our city every day. They’s betting on us now. How many they can catch in a day. Half the time they don’t even eat us, they just toss us into the air and bat us around until we die.”

“This here alley-city be the longest, oldest in the human’s world. To say you from Fishbone Alley is something to be proud of. Wese two, three dozen a litter, them is four to ten, twelve tops. We will always prevail.” Grampy held his pointed nose in the air and struck the cobblestone with his toothpick like it was a king’s scepter. “Git on home now, yer momma’s making Sunday suppa. You make shore your hands nice n dirty now.”

The sun was dying in the sky, Fishbone Alley would succumb to the night long before the dark penetrated the concrete and wood and asphalt above it. In the cans and dumpsters, the scratching of tiny claws echoed, beckoning the players to bet. Even before the last orangey reflections faded from the window glass of the hundreds of human portals above, the screams began.

He awoke in a panic, his heart threatening to burst from his chest.

It was before sunset. His family would all be sleeping until dark. They wouldn’t notice him gone until then. Then again, amongst his remaining 29 siblings, they may never know he’d left the great alley-city. A thought struck him as he scurried his way down towards the subway tunnels that would take him out of the human city…’they may just think me a chip in the The Cat’s Game. Would they care?’

‘More. There’s more out there for me before I live my short lifespan.’ The determined rat raced on, not sure what he was searching for, not running away in fear, but running to something greater than being a mere pawn.

***

On the edges of suburbia, the homes were humbler, the properties more practical. They beheld gardens. Take any backroad of the suburbia of a great human city and there you’ll find gardens bursting with color and fluttering petals like hands waving springtime in. Clapping crowds of purples, reds, pinks, yellows, even lavender and pale blue. Clapping with all their might and joy for …what? Who knows. Perhaps a singer like no other. Perhaps a sports star breaking a record. In a city, there are always crowds to acknowledge a great achievement.

Filomena thought that was why her family stayed in the garden city of Starr’s Yard.

This was not spring but summer. Not as colorful, but just as splendid. The gardens are green but the grasses brown and yellow and dead. Further towards the railroad tracks, were smaller homes with gardens full of not flowers…but vegetables. These gardens were now decorated with fat green squash and cucumbers. Orange carrots peeked from loamy soil as well as radishes and purple beets and turnips. Curtains of vines in this season were weighed down with fat pea pods and slim green beans, the curly ends of the vines wiggled like thin worms in the breeze.

Filomena the small brown rabbit sniffed the fertile air. She dug around the base of a plump sweet carrot and was about to take a little taste…when the sharp yip a couple rows over froze the marrow in her bones. ‘No, no, no.’ she thought. The shrill scream hurt her huge ears. It had been one of her sisters, which one she couldn’t tell. Playful screams were so, so different from death screams.

While the terrier was busy killing her sister, she tugged out the carrot and ducked back into the hole, dragging it with her.

“Filly. Great job, nice carrot,” said her father. Then he asked, “Was Posey---”

She cut him off, “---yes Pappa, she’s gone.”

“Poppa, can’t we---”

“Not this again Filly. This is our city. Starr’s Yard is famous throughout all rabbit lands. The most veggies and the tenderest flowers of spring…” his eyes always got glassy when he mentioned the spring. It had just been this last one when Filly’s mother had been snatched by the terrier. “More rabbits will come settle here, we will outnumber the terrier---”

Filly’s brother, Dupree, rushed into the room, somersaulting to a halt, tossing fine dirt over his sister. As she shook the dusty fallout from her fur, Dupree said excitedly, “Poppa! That terrier is gonna have pups! I jus heard---”

“Pree! You up to the kitchen again?”

Filly broke in, “Poppa! Don’t you get what Pree’s a-sayin? One terrier is bad enough, but seven…or eight even…we’ll be slaughtered. We need to find---"

“Children! Kila’s a Jack Russell. A pure breed. The humans will sell her pups. We will always outnumber them.”

Filly sighed. Every day was the same. Forage, hear the screams, meet a new rabbit her father tried to hook her up with. They only wanted the same thing- to breed. She felt the terriers were coming and she was determined to find them a new place. One that wasn’t a city yet, land that was new and terrier free. At dawn, she headed out, sure her father and stepmother would be too busy with their new babies to notice her gone.

She was not a brave rabbit. Nor fierce. She refused to believe rodents were the bottom of the food chain. Every day she heard the screams of her siblings and cousins, and she just couldn’t take it anymore, being sad and in mourning all the time. ‘I have nothing to lose,’ she kept telling herself until it became like a mantra.

She hopped along all day, ears pushed forward like radar dishes. Freezing when she heard the breath of anything larger than her. Her brown speckled coat camouflaged her amongst the dead summer grasses and brush. She reeled in her panic often, freezing instead of running, for she knew her white cotton ball tail would give her away like a flag that said, “Go!”

She hid when the shadows of large birds flickered like black eels over the ground. Hawks screeched like angry banshees as they soared through the blue sky above, she didn’t understand why they warned her kind like that and felt badly for the ground squirrels that seemed to be deaf.

It took Filly three days to reach the human yards devoid of nearly anything but garbage- dead rusty cars, old tires, crates and cans and bottles. The homes were smaller, some up on large bricks. It was dusk when she was disheartened as she came upon a strange road, made by humans, but not hard and flat…this was a cold metal bar…in both directions it went on and on into the horizons on each side of her. Ten paces from one was another. There were thick wooden boards buried in between and spaced eight paces apart. The wood smelled oily, the smell of diesel and coal and faraway places. She hopped along this path until it was full dark. Then…

Suddenly the metal rail she was standing upon began to quiver ever so slightly. Her ears picked up a rumbling sound, a breathing sound as well, like nothing she’d ever heard before. She imagined this had to be a dragon! And as she listened, she felt the cold metal of the flattened rod beneath her paws vibrate as if it were a kettle about to explode. A light appeared from her right side. She knew she should move, run, and hide, but part of her didn’t know where she was going- forward? Backward? She was exhausted too and beginning to feel all this rebellion was futile.

The light was white and bright and round and getting larger by the second.

She decided that dying by this dragon’s hand was ultimately better than death in Starr’s Yard. It would be fast she knew, and she’d never have to hear the screams again. She braced herself and refused to cry out as the light grew into what was the apocalypse for her. ‘At least I tried,’ was her last thought…

***

Whip had travelled through the human city’s underground and had become intrigued by the scents in the air when he’d reached the railway station. This vast human space was full of the scents of popcorn, hotdogs, red licorice, and deli sandwiches. He wasn’t so much into the vomit and fecal waste smells. He was becoming depressed because he thought he may have been wrong to leave the city in the alley. He’d not found a place where he was sure his family would come to. When he’d come to the train station, he’d found plenty of refuse, but it was so so vast and the inhabitants there were…not friendly. It was disorienting to not be able to tell whether it was day or night. When the huge metal human transporters stopped running, and all the bustling-about-humans were gone…the other humans came out. He’d known them from Fishbone Alley, same smell…but…these looked to him with lust in their muddy red eyes. They wanted to eat him.

So, he followed a track until he felt chilly fresh air riffle his fur. He saw a thousand tiny sparkles in the black sky and stared until tears prickled his eyes. Stars he’d never seen before, Fishbone Alley’s night sky was purple with yellow lamplight and the buzzing, trebling of red and green neon. He found himself in a vast open space under the stars and was dizzy with vertigo and deaf as if swimming underwater. He was shocked from his stupor when a human transporter roared past him, merely five feet away, with all the fury of an iron demon rushing up from hell, complete with fiery sparks as if conjuring up some flames from its throat. It roared and screeched past without sparing him a single glance, leaving its gaseous breath in its wake. He’d never seen one so big before. Then and there, he decided to follow the rails in the direction the beast had come from.

On and on he walked the tracks. He was about to scurry down the embankment and find shelter from the coming dawn, when the rail began to vibrate. It could only be another of those giant dragon-like beasts…and sure enough, its round white beacon shone on the horizon. The pace at which the light grew indicated that it was coming very fast indeed. He was about to tumble down the embankment when he noticed a silhouette on the tracks about ten feet ahead, backlit by the great white eye. He stared, unsure of what it was. ‘Be a filthy cat,’ he thought. But as the light intensified, the silhouette became distinct. Two long ears popped up as it sat up on its hind legs.

Whip sprinted towards the light-tranced figure, certain he’d have some very flattened bones in just a second. He leapt.

They tumbled head over toe, locked together, down the embankment like a furry soccer ball. At the bottom they struck an old rubber tire and broke apart.

“Oof!” said Whip, shaking his head which was still spinning.

“Wh-wha?” said the female voice to his right.

He turned to her. “You nutballs crazy?!”

Filomena flinched and tucked herself into a ball, covering her eyes.

“Hey now. Here here. Is just me. Whippersnapper the rat.”

The furball uncurled and looked up at the rat.

“H-Hello,” said Filomena. She looked upon the rat and groaned. He reeked of maggoty human garbage and was ripe with the smell of a sewer.

“Hey there,” said the rat again, as he extended his paw. “I’m Whip. I be findin a new city for my kin.”

Filomena shook her head because he sounded like an inside voice of hers. “I am also seeking a new place for my kind. I come from Starr’s Yard. We are being killed off and it’s going to get worse…” tears sprung into her eyes, and she angrily brushed them out. “I’m only one small bunny trying to find us safety---I’m Filomena. I go by Filly.”

“But yes! That is me too!” cried Whip. “Not the Filly part…you know.”

The two looked around. The sun was coming up. They found themselves surrounded by oak trees and were just about to settle into the hollow of one’s roots when…

“Do you smell that?” asked Whip.

Filly stopped and wiggled her pink nose. “Yes. Eggs. And bacon…rye toast…”

“…and orange jam, my favorite.”

And then the sounds came to them: squeals of children’s laughter, happy shouts of adult males, a woman singing. Whip and Filly raced through the oaks with renewed spirit. Up a hill covered in dandelions, then halted at the top, ducking down. They looked down upon a large field of yellow grass, tamped down flat and surrounded by human dwellings. The homes were smaller than the houses Filly was familiar with, many had wheels. Here and there were colorful tents, and everywhere were humans preparing for breakfast. They were all laughing and smiling.

“Look,” said Filly, “over there. A garden. Peas, lettuce…ooooo is that broccoli?”

Whip made a face. Then he brightened, “where there’s this many humans there will be mountains of trash. I smell barbeque.”

“I see a couple of dogs. Not terriers. One’s big and yellow…slow looking. The other is frosty-faced.”

“I don’t see any cats.”

“C’mon. Let’s wait until dark. Then we’ll feast.”

***

I awoke in the top of my oak tree as the sun was setting. The bats were out, flittering back and forth like kites with their strings cut. Let them get the insects. I had an appetite for meatier prey, something I could really sink my hooked beak into.

I crawled from my burrow and stretched my wings, blinking the sleep from my eyes…I smelled food. The humans in the campground were barbequing again. What a waste of red, blood-filled meat...

Hmm. I smelled blood and fur- rodent. Close by.

My love called out to me from her home across the field. “Whoo-hooooo. Whoo-hooooooooo.” She had a beautiful voice, so melancholy. I was about to answer her call but thought better of it. If there was indeed prey nearby, I did not want to frighten it away. My love was committed to me, we were planning on hatching a family the coming spring and moving into a larger burrow together. She’d understand.

I heard voices. It was nearly full dark now. I was careful to keep my shadow from the ground as I crept lower down the branches.

There were two of them.

One was telling the other of his home. “…Fishbone Alley. Ah the smells, how I miss them so. Chinese, Italian, a couple of burger joints. Piles and piles of decaying refuse for miles…”

A rat. A city rat. Nice and fat.

“Ew.” Said the other one. She told the rat of her home. “…Starr’s Yard. Every veggie you can think of---”

“---I don’t think of veggies very often---”

“---oh you.” She giggled.

A rabbit? I resisted the urge to peek over the branch.

The rabbit sighed and said, “the Jack Russell is going to have puppies. Our paradise is lost. My father says not to worry but I do. I very much miss my sisters and brothers. I think if he sees this garden we can move…make a new city…here.”

The rat said, “No cats. And even if there were, these oaks are full of burrows. My gramps is stubborn, but he’s old and slowing down. Surely, he’ll see that we can multiply and prosper here.”

The more I listened the more I salivated.

A long time ago I’d heard a human man telling a child a story. That’s what owls are best at. Spying. The story was about a father bull and his son. I’m sure you’ve heard it too by now, it is a very old tale. A proverb perhaps? The one where the son lustfully says, “father, lets run down this hill and into that field and take one of those cows.” The father says, “son, why not walk down this hill, save our energy…then take every single cow instead.”

I’ve always liked that one.

So, although my mouth was watering and it would have been so, so easy to snatch up both fat rodents, perhaps one in each talon…I chose to let them live. For now. And I thought, ‘move wherever you like. Have as many babies as you can. You will always be at the bottom of Food Chain City.’