the bad reputation his species suffered from Sometimes after dinner when Miss Pomeroy sat in the living room and watched TV Walter would tiptoe out from his hiding place and sit quietly in a corner Miss Pomeroy he never thought of her as Ms had a penchant for old movies and it was not unusual to hear an actor on the screen say You dirty rat when referring to someone evil Once years ago at the dump Walter had rescued part of a book titled A Field Guide to Small Mammals and had read this about rats The Common rat is an insufferable nuisance There is no courtesy or kindness in his nature no nesting bird is safe from his attacks He is a villain and will eat almost anything from the refuse in the garbage heap to the dainty egg of a willow wren He is known to spread diseases such as typhus spotted fever and bubonic plague The words had made Walter weep for he himself and most of his relatives had always been kind clean and considerate If they had spread diseases they had been unaware of it and as far as he could remember he Walter had committed only one crime In a moment of hunger and confusion he had eaten two of his offspring but he had been only eight months old at the time a young impetuous rat and he had never done it
Walter had lived in Miss Pomeroy’s house for six months Adjoining her kitchen was a storeroom and behind an old bureau in this room was a hole in the floor The hole led to a passageway Walter had created and leading from the passageway were several chambers One chamber was for sleeping and another for storing food A third larger chamber was his library where he kept remnants of books and magazines He usually read at night though he had an unfortunate tendency to nibble the candles which gave him illumination At present Walter was reading a paperback book on Imperial Russia Some very important people royalty actually had been assassinated during a revolution long ago Their dog however had been spared It was a tragic tale filled with wonderful names Nicholas Alexandra and Rasputin Olga Alexei and Anastasia Words swam through Walter's mind like bright fish darting back and forth He did not always understand what he was reading but the experience excited him All those images all those thoughts and ideas The first book he had owned was not exactly a book but a book jacket found in a trash can The title on the jacket was A Farewell to Arms and for a long time Walter had thought the story was about people losing their arms a real predicament How would they drive cars without arms How would they cook dinner A year later he had come across the book itself and realized his
Arms meant armaments The book was about war There were many things Walter liked about Miss Pomeroy The first was that she was old like himself and had streaks of white in her hair that resembled the white on his muzzle And the second thing was that she was unconventional She wrote her books not on a computer but on an old typewriter and when she wrote she always wore a shabby blue bathrobe and stuck a pencil in her hair She was careless in the kitchen a habit that afforded him many midnight snacks and often forgot to open her mail which lay about on the hall table for days Whereas Miss Pomeroy was relentlessly untidy Walter was neat He kept the various chambers of his nest in perfect order and was fussy about his appearance Never a day passed when he did not groom his fur clean his whiskers and scrub his face with his front paws It was because of her mail from agents and publishers that Walter first realized Miss Pomeroy was a published writer She wrote books for little children uveniles She was famous Miss Pomeroy however seemed not to care about fame What she liked was to work at her rickety typewriter during the day and watch TV at night She would drink white wine and talk out loud about the movies she watched making comments Her favorite film was The Maltese
How miraculous Walter thought that he a reader had come to live in the house of a writer It was a stroke of fate Because he was a sensitive creature Walter understood that Miss Pomeroy was lonely It was not that the world didn't want her she didn't want the world Perhaps solitary was a better word than lonely but no one ever came to the house and thank goodness she did not own a cat She slept late every morning and drank black coffee for breakfast She snacked rather than preparing real meals and sometimes lay flat on the floor listening to music There were no family photographs in her bedroom and she never made her bed Her phone
