Rodent Behavior

Dec 23, 2020
2 min read

by Mandira Pattnaik

Different standardized behavior patterns exist, according to her teachers, but for best results, familiarize yourself with the species, and methodology, before committing to it.

She scribbles vigorously until lab class is over.

Preserved specimens line the walls: reptiles swimming in formaldehyde, frozen eyeballs boring into her.

Afterwards, discharging the vows to her mother who died trying to cross over, into the dormitory sink, she retraces her steps to the concrete school building — humongous and intimidating — holding stories and secrets in its piers and lofts.

Later today, the cleaner boys will be here, subscribing to daily order, trucks parked on heaps of rubble, ready to unload trash. They’ll squabble among themselves, but gawk at her when she arrives.

At dawn again, they’ll vanish into clouds of dust.

Sometime tonight she’ll deviate from pattern expected of her.

Of course, school is a utopian afterthought, array of misfits she doesn’t try to fit into; classes, distraction from her meaningless expressions, impaired focus, ill-at-ease limbs.

When she walks to the teacher’s desk, past rickety desks, and putrid smell hanging in the room because of unwashed uniforms, and bin right outside the window, the class boys whistle, low and audible only to her — they can smell what the girls can’t.

She ignores them—menace, pests.

Unloading the fire-ants she’s carried in her pocket back from the field between the two buildings, she sits back; squeaks when students in rows ahead of her squirm.

Scrap of paper teacher has just given her, is crumpled in her hand, a trophy for a refugee.

Mice must get into the tub, swim across, act handsomely. If they’re found to generate preconceived outcomes, they win twelve-digit-identifier-string that says —

Outlier. Permitted.

She’s Venus beyond the precincts of the Home. Scales barbed wire fencing easily, timing her escape perfectly to guards hallucinating in opium-induced hibernation.

At six weeks, she can still very well manage to be queen with the cleaner boys. Unleash the power that nature has given her.

Later, she lets the ink swallow her, powder her to grit.

Tomorrow the guards wouldn’t be too surprised to find one more girl missing; not be too perturbed about emergency medications shoved behind the antique cabinet in the hallway, also mice that scatter in the commotion.

Some of them will regroup again in the shadow of the damp wall.

Mandira Pattnaik’s work has appeared in Watershed Review, Splonk, EllipsisZine, Passages North, Bending Genres, and Amsterdam Quarterly, among other places. She has received nominations for Pushcart Prize ’21, BOTN ’20 and Best Microfiction ’21. Tweets @MandiraPattnaik