One night in late January, I was sitting on the shaggy carpet in my room, leaned against the white paneled wall. I held my journal in my lap and was waiting for a reason to write in it. My two pet rats were peering out from their steel cage in the corner, hanging on the bars like prisoners in despair. They know how to pull my heartstrings. I opened their door and handed them each a sunflower seed. They scurried inside their wooden castle on the top floor before returning to the door, their little hands grabbing onto my index finger, begging for more.

They had been living with me for over a year, Bianca and Julie. As on most nights, Bianca rushed out first to interrogate me for more food. She is a dark gray dumbo rat with white coloration on her torso, like a t-shirt. When I first got her, it only took a few days before she began to trust me enough to hold her. Within a month, she would often come when I called her name, and took to nesting in my sweatshirt while I moved throughout the house. She was, of course, still adeptly attuned to each movement I made, as most prey animals are, and quick footsteps are still signals of her impending demise. But she settled into my home quite smoothly. This night, she ran up on my leg and attempted to steal my pen before disappearing underneath the bed. Julie scampered out a few minutes later. She skidded down the cage wall and landed with a soft thud. She regained her position, swiveled her head side to side to scan the room for irregularities, and hopped over towards me.

Julie is a hairless, albino female rat with red, poorly sighted eyes. Unlike Bianca, who I had purchased from a local rat breeder, I bought her from a pet store in Kent after a misgendering snafu with another rat from Bianca’s breeder. Julie belonged to a select group of ‘feeder rats’. The owner, a gentle, white-haired old man, explained this as he led me through the store, past a maze of shrieking and squeaking voices and to a big Plexiglass tub in the back of the store. Dozens of white and black little bodies nestled together in a field of shredded woodchips. A few times a week, he would reach into the container to randomly select some poor life to finally bring to its close. For him, this was an unfortunate business that the snakes required him to do. He had trouble securing contracts for frozen rodents, and stated that it was his least favorite part of owning a pet store.

As we approached the iridescent dome, the biggest rat, who looked something like a miniature, demonic pig, darted underneath a scrap of newspaper. She poked her head out after a few moments, bobbing side to side with wide red eyes. I asked about her. The old man immediately prescribed her as a poor pet: blind, perpetually terrified, prone to health issues as an albino rat, and impossible to handle. But my decision was made. And so he picked her up by the tail, grunting in consonance with Julie’s own petrified squeaks and sorrowful attempts to escape, and tossed her in a Tupperware container. She cost less than a Big Mac.

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