Amy and Kyle were just married when the pipes burst in their newly repaired basement. The rats from the dumpster of their favorite bar, the Cozy Inn, burrowed through the concrete and formed a pinkish fist-sized mass in the mountainous bill-box Kyle left under the sink. Amy discovered the rat family first, when she took the laundry down. She turned on the light exposing a crouched, grizzled granddaddy pulling apart a Soft Batch cookie with its pink claws. She did not tell Kyle because they just fought about money and couldn't afford an exterminator.
Kyle discovered the rats when one skittered over his hand as he pulled a running shoe from the closet. He tried to kill them with an old fire-can filled with bleach, while Amy stood on the basement stairs and yelled at him. When he stayed bent over hefting a shovel, his ass crack showing, Amy went back upstairs. He didn't come up for an hour. She didn't know he could have that kind of response. He was normally so accommodating. She was also surprised she sympathized with rats, which had shrimp-colored feet and traditionally carried fleas and, well, death. But in high school, her best friend had two rats, which perched in Amy’s lap, their tails giving her wristlets. If Kyle didn’t care at all about animal sentience, perhaps he didn’t care about humanity, and then she didn’t know him.
The way he spoke to the cell phone company, the speed with which he volunteered to fold laundry, the sounds he made toward the TV all came under scrutiny, and she felt like Telly Savalas. Only she couldn’t remember which show Telly Savalas was on or why she associated him with childhood and scrutiny. Did Kyle care about people? Was he angry when they watched that documentary on Ethiopian women’s health and the prevalence of fistulas? When they listened to public radio and he became furious, was it the politics or the dish sprayer’s tendency to stick and make a jack-hammering rat-tat-tat? The frustrated rats and their polyphonic squeals made it hard to sit in the kitchen without gagging.
Amy decided the only way to peacefully eject the rats was to contact an occultist who did local séances and owned the Healing Hearts Center. She ran her decision past Kyle while he studied a Scrabble board and had a beer, but he barely looked up from his word, triplets. He liked Zelda, enough. In fact, he had dated her once. Even though he said nothing, he answered the door when Zelda came over carrying a purple candle, a thick furry ball that smelled like icy-hot, and a velvet bag. Zelda lit the candle and produced a crystal from her pocket, surprising both of them. Kyle got a misty look in his eyes that made Amy back-up to their dining table and rethink every time she scrutinized his actions as if they existed in a kaleidoscope, her ideas magnified and fragmented in a glass eye.