First Chapter of My New Story

If you read it, please tell me what you think. Thanks so much. This is the first chapter of the story I'm writing on the man who falls into the sewer and has to find a way out. Thanks again.

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1

He used his fingernails to scrape the hair off little by little. The brown fur, coarse and wiry over the soft, tender flesh was still warm. In the dim light he could see that it was coming off better than it had been by simply trying to rip it out. The body, which hung limp like a bag of sand, began to bleed through the pores where the hair had been forcefully removed. Going in the opposite direction of its growth, he could see the hair falling out, falling like the long brown ashes of the rat’s demise.

He held it in his open palm, his middle finger beneath its chin and its groin sitting on his wrist, the long shoestring tail dripping down along the underside of his forearm. He squeezed its neck as gently as he could with his right hand as he dragged his dirty fingernails across its flesh with his left hand.

He was sitting on his ass in three inches of muck-water, it trickling in a steady stream through the fibers of his jeans and the fabric of his shoes. The tube he was in was not more than four feet high, and the sound that the stream made echoed up in a spiral to his ears where he had learned to mute it out or distract him from the absolute aloneness of his situation. A pile of hastily collected newspapers lay next to him on the part of the sewer that slanted upwards, away from the stream of water so as not to get wet. More was shoved behind his back as a cushion.

He worked fast, his left hand peeling the hair off voraciously. He wanted to eat it warm. He had shaved from the neck down, not worrying about the head too much because he had no desire to eat that part. He went back and attacked the hairs he missed, pulling them at the root with great success. He returned to scraping down, an inch, two inches of bare rat flesh. It was harder to get the hairs around the feet and, like the head, he decided those would be a lost cause, as well.

He readjusted the small corpse in his hand and turned it on its side. The skeleton and warm innards slid beneath the rat’s thin layer of skin. The hairs were as greasy as they were coarse, like the fibers of an old broom. Its mouth hung open slack, tiny teeth like a zipper lining both the top and bottom lips. Down near the sides the hair was shorter and demanded more precise scraping to get it all out. Beads of dewy sweat appeared on his forehead as he worked harder, faster, his own insides moaning in desperation for food. It was like trying to rip out a grown man’s beard, the hairs were so coarse and crusted and short.

After a few more minutes of intense labor, he began to grow frustrated, readjusting the rat in his sweating hand, squeezing its neck a little tighter and making the blood seep out more intensely.

He began to shake, his teeth chattering, his hands unable to get a firm grip on any of the hairs that he targeted. His eyes strained in the darkness, and the echo of the gurgling water grew more intense. Squeezing his eyes shut and then forcing them open again, he pulled without method. The rat’s body became patchier, blood running down the length of his arm, under his elbow and down onto his jeans. Its body flopped back and forth as he pulled at it frantically. Its pink paws scraped his hands, the tail swinging back and forth like a tetherball rope.

He let out a short scream, using his left hand to pull and twist on the rat’s head and letting the right pull its body away. The head came clean off and its small weight made him drop it into the shallow pool of water below. The blood leaking from the body spurted in such a steady flow that it looked like a red piece of yarn connecting the rat to the sewer itself – a wet umbilical chord. His impatience was his salvation. Laughing giddily, he pulled the skin down from the neck and ripped it off the rat’s meat like a flesh coat, around its feet and tail. The red meat glistened in the darkness, sparkling in its naked freshness.

He thought, it looks like a quail. And he was right. Despite his immense hunger, he still had to convince himself that it was not exactly what it was. Patches of fur were clinging to his hands and he wiped them hurriedly on his jeans so as not to let it come into contact with the perfect, ripe crimson of the rat’s meat. The quail’s meat.

He reached into his pocket with his left hand and retrieved the lighter he had found the same day. He stood up slowly, his joints aching from the strain of his position, and turned towards the paper he had collected. With the lighter still in his hand, he bunched it all together, frequently having to adjust the bush together and away so as not to let it fall into the stream and be carried away by the current.

He worked quickly now, licking his lips (hungrily? greedily? nervously?). He used his free hand to pull out the rat’s tail, but it was harder than expected. His resolve unyielding, he wrapped the tail around his hand like a bandage and pulled downwards, and it snapped out like a strained rubber-band. He bled it for a few seconds, then reached into his back pocket where he had placed the thin, metal rod.

He pierced the ratmeat with the rod through the stomach, and twisted and pushed it inside, guiding it towards the back of what had been the rat’s neck. After a few seconds of sawing back and forth through the stringy flesh, the end of the rod popped through, an inch short of the bloody gash where the spine gaped open, as the rat’s mouth had done before it had been removed. As he took his hand off the rat’s body to see if the rod could sustain it, the entire corpse rotated upside-down, tugged on by gravity. With his thumb and his bent pointer finger, he held the body on the stick, and used his free hand to flick the lighter on.

He lowered the flame to the edge of a frayed sports page and the paper lit the tunnel up in a gorgeous amber hue that he had not witnessed in a long time. The luminous light, God-given, intended, was so bright he had to shield his eyes with his hand as it caught on the rest of the paper. He dipped the rat-stick into the fire and watched the skin sweat and then begin to color slightly as the fire, now more rapidly and with more intensity, picked up and consumed the rest of the paper. He had stuffed extra paper into his pants for insulation from the cold and began to unload it, little by little, feeding the fire as he rotated the meat like a rotisserie. The smell was gray and delicious, the smoke black and putrid, and the mixture made his eyes water.

He fed the fire for several minutes, enjoying its blessed warmth, watching as the meat darkened and glistened as though it had been glazed with sugar. Honey-baked rat meat. Peppercorn rat. Brined. Broiled. Boiled. Burnt. He lifted the meat away from the dying fire and squeezed it between two fingers. Its texture was now that of chicken, sinewy as string and so tender. Pan-fried. Deep-fried. Flash fried. French fries. His mind wandering, he pulled two pieces of the hot meat open and saw that it was still very rare in the center, and his supply of paper was almost out.

He thought, this is as good as its going to get.

He stuck it over the last of the flames, but in less than a minute, there was nothing but a few orange embers glowing pathetically amongst the ash and dirt. Lifting the meat to his nose, he sniffed it curiously, but could only smell the smokiness of barbequed meat. His hands quivering slightly, he lowered the meat to his mouth, and gingerly pulled at the meat with his teeth. Chicken. Quail. Rabbit. Squirrel. Rat.

He bit into it, and suddenly, …