Transgressions by Sallie Bingham

Author:Sallie Bingham
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sarabande Books
Published: 2011-10-03T00:00:00+00:00

Rat

Rat held on hard to her own life. (She called herself

Rat. Other people called her Rebecca.) She knew its value because she’d tried more than once to lose it–direct attempts, and indirect: drugs, motorcycles, crazy boyfriends. Now, in late middle age, she’d learned to hold onto her life as she held onto her periwinkle-blue five-pound dumbbells: with a steady, unrelenting, two-fisted grip.

Then happiness came. She’d never expected it. It grew like a firm weed in the soil of her intention. Perhaps her light grip on her life, earlier, had failed to sustain the seedlings she now understood held happiness—or its possibility—in their frail green shoots.

Happy, she remembered all kinds of things: the smell of her mother’s hand lotion—Hinds Honey and Almond Cream. (As a child, she’d thought it was Hands, Honey, and Almond Cream.) She remembered her grandmother’s stories, and the old lady’s silky smell—many of her memories were built around women’s delicious cakelike smells.

Once her grandmother had described a pair of rats who’d found a way to drag an egg from the kitchen to the attic, where they could devour the egg in peace: one rat lay on her back, clasping the egg with her arms and legs, while the other rat dragged her upstairs by her tail.

Rat had taken her secret name from that story. She believed the greatest difference between rodents and human beings (laying aside humans’ ridiculous fear of anything that scuttled) was the rodents’ ability to hold on. In her grandmother’s story, the rat knew exactly how to hold the egg firmly enough to carry it without fracturing its delicate shell.

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