And the Rat Laughed - By Nava Semel Page 0,35

later disavowed as your scientific career progressed. Maybe that’s why you dismissed Girl & Rat with such contempt, and why you judge it as nothing more than a primordial fear of light – a final effort of civilization to make way for darkness before it completely disappears.

What is fear, Stash? My genetic card reads “Repaired”.

A hole-child

Is running out of skin

The dream...

I feel as if I’m nursing you – a rare ritual practised by only a few remote tribes on earth.

You’re not ready to give yourself over yet, but my implachip senses how your flashes of resistance are growing weaker.

I’m not trying to undermine the authority of the Anthropological Institute, Stash. On the contrary: I have great respect for the pioneers who paved the way for me. Into your dream I’m beaming a study by Professor Reiner Marcellus Schwartz, who tried to prove that the creatures in Girl & Rat are not really from the twenty-first century at all. He pointed out the pagan and Christian motifs that appear throughout the legend, and mapped out its course from its days as a popular legend towards the end of the Roman Empire until its incorporation into the Digital Age. I want to tell you about the theory of my supervisor, Professor Mammuna Shanti: she believes that the work was originally written in Gujerati, and that it contains echoes of the Great Earthquake of Gujarat in 2001. Among other things, Professor Shanti makes recourse to the literature which tried, none too successfully, to link Girl & Rat to the Temple of the Rats – the Karni Mata Temple in the town of Deshnok in Rajasthan. Even though it hasn’t been used for worship for almost seven decades, the shrine is still intact. Over the years, it has housed thousands of rats, and they’ve received the daily offerings of believers and priests. Various myths surrounding the shrine establish a clear link between a feminine, maternal divinity and rats as the reincarnation of human-cubs.

Your implachip is not responding.

You’re still fighting me.

All of the studies before mine led to a dead end. Even Professor Mammuna Shanti ultimately retracted her original theory, and in our final exchanges, she sided vehemently with your interpretation of the poem as the outpouring of a subversive entity that had been taking advantage of the electronic networks in their earlier days to gain maximum circulation within a short period.

All of the experts have dropped Girl & Rat, but I...

An amazing discovery...

Because if I stop being afraid

I’ll no longer be...

Your REMaker is trying to throw me out. Don’t fight it, Stash. It is competing against Girl & Rat and I’m spitting out broken lines. What a shame that the original collection has not been found. Jews are mentioned in only a single poem from an earlier version, a very fragmentary one.

Stuck inside the brain...

An undo command is needed...

Can’t get rid of...

A little girl is treading on the outstretched tail of a rat in the volcanic mouth of Mount Egmont in New Zealand. It was a circus act performed only once in 2024, a few months before the Great Ecological Disaster, which is why it was never documented. I have no choice but visualize it for you.

According to my genetic card, that was when the process of my conception began. That’s when my fetal cells started to link.

We are watching the circus act together now. Down below is the abyss. A total void. The little girl’s eyes are shut, and she’s moving forward slowly. The rat’s tail is sweeping wildly from side to side like in a circus...

A volcanic eruption...

She’s falling, or maybe flying.

My powers of visualization aren’t strong enough to produce the ending for you.

I remember only too well the condescending b-mail where you insisted that nobody is capable any more of separating Little Red Riding Hood from the wolf that swallowed her, or of finding out if Oedipus was really a king or just a lunatic fantasizing about sleeping with his own mother.

You were right, of course. But precisely because Girl & Rat is less than a hundred years old, we can still discover its roots.

A young myth...

A thin slough, a shell...

Precisely because a myth is an encrypted historical memory, it’s my duty to discover the truth hiding underneath it, with all the stir it’s generated. Girl & Rat has been dug out, and is part of the public domain now, a free-for-all that anyone can jostle with. I’ll break off the shell and find the nucleus of truth. I must. This