Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

It was ten in the morning and the mail was due. As I was waiting impatiently for a very important letter, I went to my garden gate and looked up the street to the left in the direction from which the mailman ought to have been approaching.

     Instead of the mailman, however, my attention was caught by an enormous black rat crawling slowly but unhesitatingly towards me along the gutter. I gave a shudder of repulsion and hurried back indoors, where I quickly sat down at my desk and began to write, in an attempt both to allay my impatience for the delivery of the letter I was expecting and to blot out the memory of the revolting animal I had seen in the gutter.

     After a few minutes, however, I heard a scrabbling under my feet and soon afterwards the sound of gnawing. I rose from my chair and retreated into the far corner of the room, from which I watched horrorstruck to see what would happen next.

     In no time at all a hole appeared in the floorboards and a black snout poked up, followed by the whole loathsome body of the black rat I had seen outside in the street.

     The rat crouched in the centre of the room, gazing at me. My feeling of disgust and repulsion was only too well justified, but the fear that went with it seemed to have no rational foundation: after all, though this was by far the largest rat I had ever seen it was still very much smaller than I, so that it really offered no serious physical threat — yet I was convinced that a bite from its horrible yellow teeth would inevitably become poisoned and probably cause death from gangrene; so that even if I beat it to death with some blunt object, or even kicked it to death, I was most likely to die myself if I allowed it to get close enough to sink its teeth in my ankle.

     I gazed at the creature as though hypnotized. Then I found myself walking into the kitchen, where I took a bottle of milk from the refrigerator and a saucer from the cupboard, returning with them to the living-room. Overcoming my repugnance with an effort of will, I placed the saucer before the rat and filled it with milk. I then returned to the corner of the room and watched with horrified fascination as the rat drank the milk.

     When it had finished the milk, the rat looked up at me. I went back into the kitchen and fetched a piece of meat, which I placed in the now empty saucer. The rat devoured it greedily.

     I thought with horror of what, against my will and as though at the dictate of a higher power, I had just done. Not only had I made this revolting creature my pet — far worse than that, I had made myself its servant.

     Now I am unable to leave the house. Whenever I make a move towards the door the rat threatens to bite my ankle. Moreover, it has gnawed through the telephone cable and so cut off my only link with the outside world. If anyone picks up this account of my plight that I have thrown out of the window, I beg him to send aid as quickly as possible.

     The situation is all the more desperate as the rat appears to be growing rapidly larger. Eventually my store of food will be exhausted and I ask myself apprehensively what the rat will eat then.

     So far as I know, the letter I was waiting for has still not been delivered. If it has been delivered, it must have been devoured.