Her mother resumed her vigorous brushing. Lily sat at the dining table and pulled her long hair up over the back of her chair. “The river is so high it’s driving them out.” “It’s the rain,” her mother said as she closed the kitchen door carefully behind them. Tell him to get the biggest trap they make.” When she got off the phone, she suggested that they move to the dining room to finish Lily’s hair. Just tell him there’s a rat as big as a cat in the kitchen and he needs to stop at the K&B on the way home for a trap.
Her mother was already on the telephone to her father’s secretary. Lily drew her legs up under her and watched the spot where the rat had been. These parts, Lily thought, were unusually large, and this notion was quickly confirmed by her mother’s cry as she clung momentarily to the edge of the table. She was quick enough to see the disappearing tail and hindquarters of a rat as he scurried beneath the refrigerator. Her mother shouted and threw the brush at the stove. Her head rose and fell, like a flower on its stalk, with each stroke of her mother’s care, and each time it did she lifted her eyes a bit, taking in a larger section of the tiled floor before her. Lily’s mother observed that she couldn’t take much more rain, that it would surely rot her small, carefully tended vegetable garden, that it seemed to be rotting her own imagination. One afternoon they sat so engaged, conversing softly while outside the rain beat against the house. She looked upon this ritual of her daughter’s hair as a solemn duty, like the duties of feeding and clothing. Her mother, preoccupied with her work, holding up a thick lock and pulling out with her fingers a particularly tenacious knot, responded laconically.
Lily told her mother what had happened at school that day, or she talked of her many ambitions. In the afternoons, when she came home from school, she sat at the kitchen table, her head resting on the back of her chair, while her mother dragged the wooden brush through the long strands. A family forges new bonds as they battle a monstrous rat in Valerie Martin’s short story, taken from her kaleidoscopic short story collection, Sea Lovers.
0 kommentar(er)
