Nothing is safer than a pearl in a hailstorm. She’d never understood the phrase, until the plague had come and, with it, the rats, and suddenly they’d seemed to be the only safe things in the city.
Until a strange woman whittling in a doorway had beckoned her over, old, gap-toothed, smiling secretively, and had grasped at her hands, close, cabbage-smelling, pressing that little wooden figure into her palm.
Whispering the phrase, like a little tittering joke, into her ear. Nothing is safer.
She’d thought of throwing it away. A little wooden figure of a rat, its tail curled and stumpy, its ears delicate and hollow. She had stroked them with her thumb instead, worrying her own warmth into the wood once the woman’s had faded; there had been no one left to touch her or care about her for days by then, and only then, holding the little wooden rat, had she cried about it.
Only the morning after had she noticed the change. She had wandered the streets just like the days before, a plague rat, the guards in their sooty uniforms had called her already, and all those like her. Scurrying around spreading disease, looking for food and any little hole they could creep into. They’d shouted and kicked at her more than they had any real rats, and that was the change she noticed.
They barely looked at her. They curled their lips at her like she was the rain they couldn’t help standing in, or the muck, or, yes, the rats fighting over too many bodies in the streets to haul away.
She hadn’t believed it at first. Then she hadn’t dared find out for certain. But finally, she had run out right in front of one of them, and he had yelped and stamped and missed her, shouting about a bloody rat.
Nothing was safer than one in a million. As a girl, ragged and small and alone, he might have chased her. As just another rat, he cursed at her and then forgot her right away.
She still had her human hands, legs, speed. Cleverness. It was only the way they looked at her that had changed. The wooden rat rode safe in her pocket, and people who would have driven her out as a girl watched sullenly from their bare tables or mattresses as she sat by their fires or ate the scraps they had left.
Best of all, most brilliant of all, the rats didn’t mind at all. It was startling at first when they squirmed around her feet or she woke with them wound in tight around her warmth, her arms and legs, but she was warmer as well for it, and none of them tried to bite her when she moved. They just scattered back to their business while she yawned and stretched and scurried her own way back out into a city that just saw her, now, as another quick little piece of its misery.
