The New Weird - Ann VanderMeer [90]
If the rats do discover Brey's mother, they might find it difficult to chew through her wrappings. It might take them long enough to chew through the sheets that they would choose instead to search out other bodies. Brey's body, for example, or that of his father. Brey's father can run from the rats. Brey can lumber from them. If he is not fast enough to escape, his keys might still protect him.
Even if the rats chew through his mother's sheets, they will chew through at only one spot. The rats will stream into his mother through the single hole, eating the body hollow. If Brey surprises the rats, he will be able to sew the hole shut. The rats will be trapped. They will suffocate within his mother.
No one shall wrap Brey in sheets when he grows feeble. There is nobody to do it. He will be easy prey to rats.
When he approaches death, he will hang himself from one of the light fixtures in the hallway, out of reach of the rats. Perhaps he will collect enough keys that his entire body will be covered, armored against rats. A smart rat, however, will snout past the keys.
The wrapped feet of Brey's mother hang over the edge of her bed. His mother says little, almost never speaking directly to Brey. His father claims, however, that she asks about him often. That she is concerned about him.
His father tells him things about keys, about halls, nothing else. His father says this of the keys: "There are two ways to get the keys: you can collect the keys or you can wait for them to collect you. I have done the latter. The keys have not come. I have no regrets ― there are things more important than keys."
His Knowledge.
His mother tells him little about herself. He knows that she has always been in these halls, little more. His father is modest, speaking seldom of his own accomplishments. He knows of his father no more than he can gather from his father's commentary on rats, halls, keys. There are only stories of rats, elaborate rat traps, his father's refusal to collect keys: "If I had it to do again, I would change nothing. I do not believe in regret. Nevertheless, I wonder if you should reconsider your own course."
His knowledge of his father lies in his father's drawings and poems. His father has mentioned thousands of drawings, of rats. Brey has found only a single sheet of paper with two ink drawings upon it, plastered underneath the sink. The lines are faint, but the shapes of rats are still trapped there.
Often, Brey himself traces rats on the table with his fingers. In this, he considers himself his father's child.
He has torn pages from his notebook and drawn pictures of rats upon them, leaving them scattered through the intersections for his father to find. The drawings have disappeared, but his father has never said anything about them. Perhaps the drawings are good enough that Brey's father thinks they are his own. Perhaps the rats find them first, destroying them.
His father's poems are in a slim volume labelled Homage to Brey: (He Has Chosen to Collect Keys). His father said nothing to Brey of the book's existence. Brey discovered it in his parents' room while his father was wandering, his mother asleep. The book was wedged between the headboard and the wall. He slid the book from its hiding place, apparently without his mother and father's knowledge, and conveyed it into his room to hide under his palette. At times, as he sleeps, he thinks he feels the shape of it beneath him. His father has never mentioned its absence.
There are forty-six poems in the book. Brey knows they are poems because below each title is written the words "A Poem." Since he has stolen the book, Brey does not dare discuss the poems with his father. The poems are about rats. None of the poems scan. None rhyme. Nonetheless, Brey is moved. He is secretly proud of his father.
The halls contain myriad sounds. He has the sounds of his boots in the halls, the echo of his fists upon the windows, the jangle