Rattespierre

I have no fondness for January and March, the bluest months of the year, because it was the first big rain in January that brought me my present misfortune.

I came to in the cold and dark with a sniffle and a start. The rain was falling in cold sheets, pooled like cat's breath or curtains and piling up with debris behind the bridge columns where I lay. My sniffles echoed off the bridge above. It smelled damp and fresh, a bright smell in a dark place. The rain clamored down, hungry for the earth, in such a din it was hard to hear anything else. In the torrent of sound, a scant noise attracted my attention. Rats. My head spun and I blacked out again. The last sound I remembered was a hoarse whisper; I remember it sounding so dry and sandy it felt warm in the rain: Rattespierre.

I had no way of knowing he had saved my life that night. I was an outcast. Burped up from the river onto foreign land, my mere existence as a giant among these folk was illegal. Not that Rattespierre thought my skin was worth saving, only politically expedient to do so. He bore the brunt of many a joke for refusing to hand down a death sentence. He found it morally repugnant to kill . I felt miserable, knowing myself to be more selfish and less true to my ideals. Put into his position, I'd have hung the bastard and wept at my deserted morals. But not Rattespierre. His moral conviction may have swung like a noose in a windstorm, but he always walked North by what he thought was truth.

I hadn't even seen him, but nonetheless I felt he looked out for me. His impersonal refusal to have me killed was the only kindness shown to me in a land of man-sized rodents. I lacked the furtive glance, the deferential aversion to face-to-face contact. The few people (if I may call them that, as I have come to think of them) I had dealings with complained I made them uncomfortable with my earnest, transparent expression. I was hard to con, being such a pitiful and cold and hairless and obviously deformed Rat, and that was my only protection.

How many times I threw myself into the water, willing the river to take me back, I'm ashamed to say. What little I earned I got by telling stories of a land of hairless talking apes. Thousands of them, I would say; millions, teaming cities. With ratty guffaws, they would dismiss the ludicrous notion.

Maximilian Rattespierre. La Revolucion. La guillotine. The Committee of Public Safety.

I found myself running with him, hot on the vigilante winds of July. Rattespierre was an outlaw from a justice he had created. I was only running from la guillotine. They finally ran us to ground in Thermidor and caught up Rattespierre in a noose and I in a blanket. They marched us into the square in shackles, appropriating a boulongerie for a court. I abandoned him, slipping out while the attention of the tribunal was on him. I watched him face la guillotine. His jaw set, his nose pale, he shrugged off his captors' hands and went willingly.

I saw him as he lie there, red blood like July pooling about his paws, seeping into the crimson earth of Thermidor. His eyes were turned toward heaven, imploring the Divine Hand to the last. His body seemed so small as power slid from his shaggy hide. His limp form regressed from Rattespierre to just Max. He resembled nothing more than a giant dead rat.

July and September are the reddest months of the year.