I.

I was on the street outside my apartment—I’ll preface this by saying I was dreaming at the time—watching small shadows dip below and back over the pavement. Rats, I knew, not because of the way they moved (I have never once in my life seen a rat that could dip and dive like a fish) but because their bodies were transparent, and their little skeletons, their tiny skulls, rattled as they jumped past me into the obscurity ahead. Rat skeletons, unmistakeable by virtue of their long, troubling tails. Even in a dream.

And behind them or among them a stranger walked centre street, one hand clutching at the collar of a brown, furry coat, the other grasping a walking stick held like a sceptre. I can’t remember if the stranger wore a crown, but the sight of them was enough to elicit a thought:

Ah, the Rat King.

“Rat Queen,” said the stranger, replying to the thought, as often happens in dreams, the barrier between thinking and speaking worryingly thin. “There is always and only a queen.”

I remember following a while, partially out of fear of stepping on the rats, which by now had blanketed the street like a moth-eaten quilt.

Where are you going?

“The rats are leaving,” said the Rat Queen.

Behind us, without looking, I felt the cityscape looming. Ahead it was still dark.

But where?

The Rat Queen was now far enough away to ignore my question, or far enough that her answer didn’t reach me.

II.

I went for a walk—I’ll preface this by saying I had woken up the next day with the dream fresh on my mind—with a close friend by the canal. He was talking, I was listening. Or waiting, convinced that if I waited long enough, I would find the exact right entry to pose the question.

“Have you seen the rats?”

It wasn’t the right entry. It would never come; there is no good time in a conversation to ask about the rats.

“What rats?” he said.

And I waved a hand. “Rats. In general. Have you seen them?”

“Sure.”

“When?”

On better days, he would humour me. Ask me more questions in answer to my own, let me ramble through distressing dreams (a frequent occurrence) and try to discern their meaning or origin together. But today he was tired, or sad, or the third feeling that is a combination of both, and the answer I was left with was vague enough that I seriously wondered if he had ever seen a rat, let alone seen one this morning.

He steered the conversation back to better things, structural things, of brick and concrete and steel skeletons, all while my eyes were trained on the bushes flanking the path, the nearby trees. Where were the rats? Where were they, usually? How did I know my dream had been a dream, and not a vision, or omen, or subconscious pattern-recognition process that had picked up on the disappearance of an entire species overnight?

My friend and I parted ways. I flattered myself, thinking my question had annoyed him enough to cut our walk short. In reality, in hindsight, I think he really was tired, and maybe a little anxious. The clouds were hanging low.

III.

I had many conversations that day—I’ll start at this point to avoid the need to preface it—following, more or less, the same pattern of a polite greeting, after which came several exchanges on the weather and other relatable subjects, and then concluding with the question which I managed to either awkwardly or painfully insert.

“Have you seen the rats?”

No one had seen them. There was some interest in the subject itself, but everyone, like me, had been caught in the motions of a day that seemed particularly busy, and so I never had the chance to explain or untangle the dread that had followed me since waking from the dream.

Arriving home after dark, I went for another walk. I hadn’t seen a rat all day. In all truth, the last time I had seen a rat had been close to a decade ago, but I attributed this to the fact that I hadn’t gone looking for rats, ever. They could be, I reasoned, like pigeons, invisible until you look for them. And maybe I had, subconsciously, sabotaged my own search, choosing at this moment to walk by the river where I had, during my quotidian walks, never seen a single rat. But the path was familiar and I needed the familiar, with the knowledge that even if I weren’t to find any rats, I was likely to see a raccoon, a squirrel, or—as I’ve sometimes been lucky enough to see—a beaver. These rat-adjacent animals, I reasoned, would offer something against the obscurity into which the rats of my dream had vanished.

Unsurprisingly, there were no beavers. I didn’t see a raccoon. And no squirrels, which I had originally thought to be impossible not to see, as I considered the animals ubiquitous, but forgot that they, like me, slept at night and possibly even dreamt too. The path by the river was quiet—unnaturally, I thought. There was wind, a warm breeze, but no leaves left to rustle in its wake. I saw no rats.

I returned to my apartment, the weight of resignation settling over me as I slipped into bed. I lay with my eyes open, holding myself in that space of uncertainty, unable to confirm or deny that the rats had left us, but willing myself to believe that they had. The rats really had left us, because the idea was novel and I would never so fully believe it again, never be so fully convinced of their mass exodus as I was in that moment, on the edge of sleep.

Because it was while I was laying there that I could grasp a grief larger than myself, outside myself. The grief buried beneath a fog of brick and concrete, beneath polite greetings and exchanges on the weather. In this twilight before sleep, I could see the skeletal rats again, hear the steps of the Rat Queen outside my door. However temporary, I could hold in my mind the eventual loss of an entire species which, really, is the loss of an entire world at a time. And that is a very difficult thing to grasp without the momentum of dreams.