Page 53 - I Live in the Slums: Stories (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

mysophobia would worsen?
One day, she actually found a metal brush to brush my fur. I was bruised all
over from her brushing, and I screamed the way pigs do when being butchered.
When she let go, I ran off and cowered under the eaves of another home. I was
still bleeding from my back. After the sun set, I couldn’t stand the cold, and I
was afraid I wouldn’t be able to endure the night and would die outside. A young
girl with a pointed face noticed me. She squatted and looked me over under the
dim streetlight. Dressed in a short-sleeved shirt, she was also shivering from the

cold. “King Rat,” she said, “you mustn’t stay here. If you do, you’ll die because
it’ll freeze tonight. Are you imitating those children? They’ve been doing this
for years. As soon as they learned to walk, they went outside to sleep. That’s the
way they’ve lived for a long time. Go on home, King Rat. If you don’t, you’ll
die.” And so I walked back slowly. Finally I was limping with almost every step.
I was cold and in pain, almost losing consciousness. When I got home, it was
probably close to midnight. The light was still on, though Auntie Shrimp was in
bed snoring. I climbed on top of the pile of firewood next to the stove and
squatted down to rest. Then, probably because of my loud groans, Auntie
Shrimp woke up. She got out of bed and looked at me by the light of the
kerosene lamp. Before long, she set the lamp down, turned, took a jar of balm
from the cupboard, and smeared it gently on my wounds. “Mouse, why didn’t
you tell me I was hurting you when I combed your hair?” she rebuked me. This
confused me greatly. What was illusion? What was reality? Did I know this
woman at all? Anyhow, the balm helped. I could finally breathe, and then I fell
asleep on the woodpile.

The very next morning, the incident that I described above happened. Even
now, I have no idea what Auntie Shrimp’s real idea was. Yet, when I ran out of
Auntie Shrimp’s home, I realized that it was indeed filthy outside! These were
the slums, after all—what could you expect? I seemed to be stepping on human
waste with each step I took. The side of the street was filled with human waste,
dog shit, and puddles of urine, heaps of decomposed vegetable leaves, the guts
of animals, and so forth. Swarms of mosquitoes and flies were fluttering around
and entering your nostrils. I couldn’t put up with it anymore, and I climbed up
that blockhouse. I sat on top of the blockhouse for a long time without
recovering my equilibrium. I didn’t understand: How had the outside
environment worsened so much in the few months that I had lived in Auntie
Shrimp’s home? People said that the slums had never been clean, but I had been

almost oblivious to that. Now the filth had completely polluted the air—so much
that I wanted to throw up. Even though I was on top of the blockhouse, I still felt
that everything below was a huge garbage dump. The stench rode the wind. The
people on the street looked down at their feet, covered their noses, and hurried