Neil Hilborn, “For Henry, Who Has Just Died”, The Future
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“For Henry, Who Has Just Gone
Henry was my pet rat, and he died last night in my hands. He was three years old, which is way longer than
an albino rat is supposed to live. To be honest, he wasn’t a very smart animal, but he was so sweet that now I wonder
if intelligence has anything to do with leading a good life. He had been sick for a few months, and every twelve hours
I had to apply antiseptic and lotion to both his back feet. By the end they didn’t really work anymore,
so he would just drag his feet behind him in a way so cute and sad that I started calling him my little sea lion. When he died it was, somehow,
a surprise: you would think that when your rat is older than older than dirt and has been sick for months you’d be sort of prepared: after I had laid out the towel
and mixed the solution, I picked him up and noticed his breathing was s slow. I lay down with him
on the towel, the towel where we’d spent the last few months, where I think we finally, really, completely loved each other,
not like humans do: humans always want something from you and he and I would rather just be together than apart,
and I pulled him toward me, and he chittered in that way that always meant he was wind coming in after a rain, his head fell forward, and there was so much less
light in the room. The lamp was so far away, like the light of a house to which there is no road. I know, he was just a rat. So many
just like him, all white, red eyes, die every day and only one or two people in white coats are even there to see it.
He was all in white, he was always there to see me. When I would wake from a nightmare, so many nightmares, I would turn on the light
and there he was, holding on, a constant companion to a prisoner, the prison being the apartment, the world being inside his cage. Once I was crying
in bed because of who knows why, and he sat beside my face and licked my tears away. I had a rat once, named Henry. Named Buddy. Named Mr. Big
Mouse. Named proof that something could need me and still love me. Named please can I have some of your apple? Or I know
you’re sad but I’m hungry. Don’t go; if you go I won’t survive: a child reaches for her father; a couple, buried in ash, dies holding each other;
a man and a woman in an office, crying slightly, sign sheets of paper; sparrows fall out of the sky together. Some day I’m going to have a child. She’s going to have
eyes like mine and such small hands. Just like she’ll need me alive then, she needs me alive now; I can’t say goodbye before I’ve had a chance
to say hello. I don’t stare off bridges anymore. I don’t count out little blue exit signs and even today, with Henry buried under a tree, a tree somewhere so far away
it feels like someone else buried him using my body, today I came home and only wanted to sleep for twenty minutes instead of always. Something needed
me once, and I know something will need me again. One day I’m going to have a daughter. She’s going to sleep through the night
sometimes. She is a light on a rock at the edge of a lonely see. You see that light out there? That’s where I’m headed. That’s home.”
