What will we do about all these rats? we say, because everyone is saying it and there are t-shirts: “What will we do about all these rats?” printed in glow-in-the-dark ink across the breast. There are t-shirts but no answers. Then Romeo visits our village dragging one thousand hissing burlap sacks. Romeo instructs us to insert our rats into the sacks and the modern wonder of snakes in a sack will take care of the rest. He delivers a sack to every doorstep, but, you know, nice try, Romeo. If we could catch rats we would’ve inserted them in sacks long ago, then hurled the sacks into the ocean. No snakes required.
Romeo dawdles between our houses, skipping about in his little green cap that points straight ahead like an arrow. He plops snake sacks from one door to the next, worse than those phonebook tomes full of names no one knows. A new question sprouts around the village: What will we do about all these snakes? Because, of course, a snake doesn’t stay forever inside a burlap sack. A snake wants to explore the ground under its belly, especially in our village where it is always early summer, where the weather is perfect, where most aspects of residential life are mostly perfect.
Cats, Romeo next suggests, to handle the snakes! So, we toss Romeo into the ocean, right off the bluffs by Sir Bolivar’s stone tower that he likes to claim is a castle, but it is just a tower. We remind him often not to get all high and mighty. And he reminds us that his tower is the tallest structure for dozens of miles, a lonely lighthouse, a mighty vision, yes, but unaccompanied by the requisite architecture that would constitute a castle.
A tower doesn’t make you a king, we say.
Makes me something, Sir Bolivar says.
Just a portion of something, we say.
Which is why you call me Sir, Sir Bolivar says, and we don’t argue because we yearn to climb Sir Bolivar’s lonely tower to watch Romeo floundering in the white horse waves below the bluffs, Romeo and his ridiculous green cap and his 216 cats. How long can they keep up the floundering? Sir Bolivar massages our shoulders and suggests that perhaps we’d like to purchase a t-shirt. But we know he’s just trying to unload irrelevance on us. T-shirts that question rats and not snakes — t-shirts that ignore the complexity of shared blame — are so last week.
Romeo slaps toward shore, bobbing along with a chorus of mewing cats, but the beaches fill with snakes and rats, rats and snakes, who have united against a common enemy. The time for floundering will soon end. Romeo can’t shore himself, nor can his cats that claw at his back and jostle his silly green cap.
As soon as Romeo sinks, Sir Bolivar cracks open a new box of t-shirts. We trudge down Sir Bolivar’s spiral staircase and return to our home. We fluff our hay mattresses, and the rats and snakes pour out. We dip buckets into the well to retrieve pails full of snakes and rats. Squatting over the latrine, our sphincters clench at the tittering and hissing below.
Sir Bolivar stalks the streets, peddling the t-shirt, now featuring an amended line painted sloppily below the rat graphic: “To hell with the snakes.” We figure no one will ever buy such pandering junk, but everyone does, of course. We can’t help ourselves. The rats probably snicker at the holes they’ve chewed through absolutely everything, including our new t-shirts.
Romeo returns as a specter, tailed by his 216 specter cats. Wispy and translucent yet luminescing bright as a full moon, Romeo and his pointed cap descend on the town.
Should we beg for forgiveness? We are too prideful and distracted by the waning relevance of our t-shirts. Romeo removes his pointed cap. We notice now that he is balding, and he seems so much older and fragile and precious. Romeo proposes a new offer. He and his feline ghosts can drive out the rats and snakes. Now that the cats are dead and thus hypoallergenic and hungerless, they seem a much more reasonable solution. For payment, he wants first borns, but we haggle him down to seconds.
A deal too good to be true usually is. We should’ve known. Sir Bolivar still claims he always knew, as if his tower granted him clairvoyance.
Over the next nine months, we witness Romeo capturing each rat and each snake only to kiss their heads. After, the affected vermin scuttle out of the city. It turns out that was all it took — the rats and the snakes were just craving affection.
Sir Bolivar is unsatisfied. He asks Romeo to explain his methods. All is so much simpler in death, Romeo says. A kiss a much better option than venom. And with that he bows to kiss us each on the forehead. His lips are so light, like air, or less. With that, he zooms off in a hovering fashion. The bumbling snake-oil huckster has evolved into an earnest enchanter, and we are impressed.
Within a few days the rats return. They form one long line. They kneel and then perish. The snakes line up behind the rat corpses and perish as well. They decorate our cobblestone roads in exclamation points and question marks. Once they are gone for good, we realize how accustomed we’ve become to the din of their skittering and swishing, that quiet buzz that lullabied us.
Sir Bolivar quivers atop his tower, telescope fixed on the rat and snake genocide, his forehead throbbing from Romeo’s ethereal kiss. We count the minutes with Sir Bolivar. We pray for the next solution, for a saint or a sage or a witch or a salesman. We pray that anyone will know what to do next. We’ll design the best t-shirts yet for our village’s savior.
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