Rosseville's rat [CREEK]

ROSSEVILLE'S RAT

ROSSEVILLE'S RAT

I have never been able to find the right way to start a story. This will be, perhaps, my worst attempt among them all.

My narration will be simple and I hope it is ok to tell, because many years have passed and it is necessary for me to tell what I witnessed and I thought I could never forget. In fact, I never forgot it, every night I dreamed with the hands and the teeth, and the pain felt so real that I woke up to scratch my skin to try to chase away the sensation that was buried in the aged scars. But, although I have not forgotten it, I am afraid that I will soon have to do it since I can see him even now, at this precise moment, under the door frame. I'm dying, and he does not want to be forgotten.

That's why I'm writing.

I was no more than a spectator in the story I am trying to tell, no more than a friend or a brother to whom this torment really corresponds. His name was Tweek, and he was twelve years old when they killed him.

We were the children of the moldy and putrid streets of Rosseville, raised by the wind that freezes the weakest, and the infected scars that the learnings left behind. We lived in the sewers, and that is why when Tweek's death circulated in the newspapers, the people out there referred to us as Rosseville's rats.

Faith never baptized us, nor did a mother feed us. We were orphaned children whom, for the most part, owed our lives to a couple of thieves. Ma was a woman with rotten teeth and sour breath, Sir was man with wide shoulders and strong fists. Their existence was dedicated to pick up the children that mothers threw into the river, or that they abandoned in the dumps. This was not the case with Tweek, for he was found in the inert arms of a raped mother, with the blood on her neck soaking him completely. I do not think that because he still lived when they found him can be considered good luck.

He grew hungry and aching like all of us, with his feet in raw flesh because of running away from the policemen, like all of us, with his lips broken by the cold wind and the punching, like all of us, and his eyes without shine, like all of us.

At nights we huddled together, but sometimes the cold was so cruel that we woke up hugging bodies without life. At that time, in the good years, we threw the corpses into the river so that the current will take away the stench and, with our children's minds, we hoped that their souls would be able to sleep without cold downstream.

In the bad years, when there was nothing to eat, we sank our fingers into the bruised flesh and took what we could, just as Ma had taught us.

That way we survived, and thus those who succumbed helped us.

But there was a winter in which every night death licked our skin, and each night the corpses were piled on top of each other. I've engrave in my memory the eyes of those children, their dark pupils and their frozen corneas, their lips half open and their bruised tongues. Tweek and I shared a blanket that winter, the only one that still retained a little color between its fibers, and the only one that did not reek of disease. We were children, but the plague does not discriminate.

We survived that winter, but the next one prepared us even more torment.

Of all children, Tweek didn't stand out. His blond hair was not the only one among the many we were, as well as his blue eyes that, once we were dead, we would all have after a few hours. But as I told you at the beginning, this story could have happened to all of us, but it belonged to him.

It was when they arrived that the real pain began. At first we only gave them indecisive, insecure glances, while we watched them sit a few meters away from us, using rotting animal fur to cover their bodies. They spoke very little, and when they did they did it in a low voice, and if you managed to listen, you would know they were not from around here. Ma looked at them cautiously, and she hurried us to give her the stolen coins once we entered the sewers. Sir cleaned a knife in the distance, and looked up very often. They were a silent threat to which we began to get used to little by little.