digital dispatches 002
test-driving "dumb bitch bulletin" now lmk what you think
I’ve been exploring Substack and reading lots of new periodicals on here. These are some of my favorites so far:
Tini Howard and Vita Ayala are prerequisites, obvi
The Colour from Toronto Ink Company
I think instead of updating you on what’s up with me I’m going to share this old essay I just unearthed about having pet rats. I think I wrote this around 2016 or 2017, and never published it anywhere. Sorry for any weird formatting or errors—it’s been so long since I’ve last looked at this!
“IF YOU NEED A FRIEND IN LOS ANGELES, GET A PET RAT”
Today I recklessly rifled through every drawer in my parents’ house to find the old boxes of photos, letters, and fragile keepsakes. I carefully unfolded tissue-thin gauzy correspondences and read the letters my father sent to his parents when he was my age. I rifled through faded photos of war heroes I never knew, but who I’m related to. I learned my grandparents’ names. They all died before I was born.
This morning, with my mother’s help, I buried a dead pet in the backyard. He was a sandy-colored dumbo rat named Patrick, ruby-eyed, and with a peculiar personality. He loved my mother and yarn. He was laid to rest in a box with red poinsettias all over it that we used for Christmas decorations.
I noticed yesterday morning that this little creature of mine was having problems walking and was refusing to eat or drink anything. I took him out of his cage and sat on the couch with him. By the afternoon I was calling my mother, to see if there was an eyedropper in this house. By the early evening, my mother was coming up the stairs to find me in tears, with my pet rat perched on my shoulder and dying.
For his final act he jumped from my shoulder to the edge of the couch, where he lay facing his cage where his “brother” rat was. He started breathing in a way that I knew meant his life was ending. I watched him until his chest stopped rising and then I was horror-struck at witnessing my first death and the loss of a beloved pet. When I touched him again, he was cold.
“You’ve never gone through this before, have you?” my mother gently asked. I shook my head. “I’m just going to fix him, before...” she said quietly and trailing off. I knew what she meant. She was going to arrange his little body in a more sleep-like position before he was stuck the way he died. Within seconds his little paws turned from healthy-looking pearly pink to faintly purple. Within a few hours his eyes were clouded over. I cut all the blossoms off my lavender plant to put inside his cardboard Christmas casket, along with a tangled skein of yarn and a dollhouse pillow my mother had sewn for me once as a child.
I sat with the dead rat cradled on my lap, lain next to the white-paw print that he had just left when he staggered through a small dish of yogurt to crawl into my open hands. I touched his cold little figure and saw the faded scratch he’d left on my wrist days before. I was having a moment of absolutely violent grief and feeling ashamed for it at the same time.
I mean, it’s just a rat, right?
The window was open and I could hear the disruptive sounds of suburbia; basketballs bouncing and garbage cans clattering while garage doors groan open and closed. This is what I hate about living in any kind of densely populated area- no moment is exclusively your own. You exist within a cacophony of human life and there is no distance between your quiet moment of careening grief and the dog barking one backyard over. You share. You are hopelessly entwined with all the other human lives and are constantly reminded of this from the never-ending sounds of lawnmowers and cars coming to a stop.
Rats have short lifespans. This is something I always knew and tried to prepare myself for. In every mention of my pet rats, in the same breath where I described the joy they inexplicably brought to my life, I would mention their short lifespans, as if this was my indoctrination to the inevitable. I thought I was bracing myself. I imagined coming to their cage one morning and finding one of them dead, like when I’d gone to check on the goldfish when I was seven years old and he was belly-up. I never prepared for the possibility of spending the day with a dying rat and watching in horror when that moment finally comes. I never prepared myself for knowing that it wouldn’t be so sudden and that he faded away even after he stopped breathing. It took a few hours for him to stop looking alive.
When I was going through all of the mementos in my parents’ house, I found receipts for iced teas alongside documentation for the doctors my father saw when he was dealing with cancer. I found a letter that I had written to my mother over a year earlier, while I was living in a cabin in Montana and working at a ranch. I told her that I was doing well, my northern friends were helping me survive the winter, and that my miraculous little rats were growing more boisterous every day. My friend Holly pet-sat for me for a week while I traveled, and later when she came to visit me at my cabin; both rats ran up to the cage bars and acted the way dogs do when someone comes home from a war. They were so happy to see her again.
Almost three years ago, I had been working in a comic book shop in West Hollywood and falling more and more in love with the thought of no longer existing. I had been restless and taking long drives at night, once even getting up at four in the morning and driving as far as east Texas. When I wandered back to Hollywood, I went to a doctor to tell him I was sad. While he had his stethoscope over my bare skin he told me, “Why are you so sad? You are too pretty to be this sad and stressed.”
“Yes,” I agreed while his hand was still inside my shirt, “I think that is part of the problem.”
A couple hours later, while I was waiting for an antidepressant prescription to be filled, I wandered next door into the PetSmart because sometimes in my nocturnal wanderings I would walk inside the brightly lit store to look at the slumbering little animals. I was standing in front of the rats’ cage when a woman with blonde hair and nervous hands walked up to me.
“Do you want a rat?” she blurted out.
“What?” was my automatic response.
“It’s just,” she took a steadying breath, “My daughter has a snake. Normally she feeds it dead frozen mice but lately she’s been feeding it live rats, and the thing about rats is, well, they scream, and I can’t listen to them screaming anymore, so...do you want a rat?”
“Yes, good lord,” I answered, just as aghast as she was.
I followed her out to her car in the parking lot and she handed me a baby rat smaller than my forefinger. I took him home, and I named him Martin.
In the next few weeks my world expanded to include a baby rat who grew fatter and brattier with each passing day and squeaked indignantly when I put him back in his cage. He slept in my pockets and shirt collars. Soon enough, I had read enough domestic rat literature to know that they always need companions, so I found a breeder about an hour away and fell in love with a lo-res image of a tiny beige rat with ruby eyes on her site. I named him Patrick.
A few months later when I left Los Angeles to move north to Montana, two teen rats rode shotgun. When I left Montana a year and a half after to move to Texas, they rode in a fleecy dog carrier atop comic boxes. I was so worried while driving through icy Wyoming and treacherous roads. I thought that the rats were getting too old for this.
Some mornings my body wakes up before my mind does, so for an incandescent moment I am nothing but awake and alive, holding my wrist up in crystalline morning light and marvel without understanding ownership of it, and I’ll know only that I am alive. This is all that registers in the long minutes before my conscious mind quietly slips back into my skin and I know that I am Leah Williams and I have woken up in my own bed and I have things to do today. When I remember these moments of non-personhood I wonder if that is what it feels like to be a newborn.
When you die, does your consciousness go away too, or are you in it until the last minute? Did my little rat’s mind go first? Did he look at his little paw and marvel at it, at the ownership of it? Does he see his tail and think about what a wonder it is to exist as he fades away? I had always wondered if the rats would understand death because their lives are so short. Does time pass for them at the same rate it does for us, or is it like dog years? Does each second pass with a proportionate strength to their short life span?
Once I found a song on the internet that was solely composed out of one summer night’s noises of chirping crickets, only slowed down about a thousand times and with added pitch modulations. When you play the crickets’ chorus slowed down, it sounds like something ethereal and arcane. I imagine that crickets hear their own music the way it sounds to us when it’s played back a thousand times slower because their lifespan is about that many times shorter than ours. Cricket songs sound like angels singing hallelujah. Crickets don’t know their life is short. They just know they are alive.
I have learned that love is cavernous. I have learned my heart is a cathedral, and you can hear every twang and pluck of its strings all the way up to the rafters. I hope my grandparents would be proud of me. I hope that my sweet little rat had a life like a cricket song.
I really like your work, especially on What If? Magik and Doctor Strange: The End. I hope that you have a great day and my apologies if I sound rude or annoying.
Incredibly beautiful.
I'm gong to go looking for that angelic cricket-chorus.