Rats and Bankers

Raging tears fill her eyes as she slaps David hard across the face.  Over her shoulder a feeling of remorse is waiting to stem the hot flow of blood in her temples, but she resists it.  David says nothing.  He has grown used to it.  He collects the coloured pencils scattered among the debris.  As he reaches for the vermillion, his favourite, one of the rats snatches it and runs to the far corner where a seething nest of newly-born young tumble over each other.  But before it reaches its home base, an electrical charge flashes across the derelict room.  Both pencil and rat are reduced to two small carbon deposits in the grey dust of the floor.  In a daze, David crawls forward to inspect the remains.

'No, David!'  Janyka grabs him by the ankle and pulls him back.  He kicks her hand away, still seething from her slap, but he gets the message and sits still, just staring at the brown powdery marks.  The once-living rat made of the same stuff as his pencil.  Not that he has any thoughts or feeling for the rat.  But his pencil...

Minutes pass.  'I don't like rotten apples,' he says.  What he means is that he is prepared to travel a little way towards reconciliation, but no further.  Not that it ever lasts long anyway.  His sister resents the responsibility she has been left with. He resents her resentment and the fact that she never takes him with her to the hospital.

They sit staring at nothing.  Janyka forces herself to enjoy an apple, avoiding the canker, the maggots and decay, until an unexpected crashing, shifting of broken furnishings and straining human voices penetrate their thick, heavy cloud of reciprocal hatred.  They shrink back to their nearest wall.  Knees pulled up, heads down, cowering.  Using hands to brush dust from their shoulders and the sleeves of their dark suits, two men, maybe in their fifties, one carrying a dark brown briefcase, push aside what remains of a door and enters the cellar.

'It can't be here.  It can't possibly be here,' says one, replacing the tail of his blue silk tie inside his jacket front.  'My, God.  The stench.'  His companion says nothing.  He shrugs, holds up the locator installed on his phone and walks towards the spot where the rat was zapped.  His friend follows.  This time, there is no sudden electrocution of frail life-forms.  Instead, for a brief moment, the blinding lines of silver light of the Mesh, a finely woven translucent net appears and is gone.  The men, too, are no longer in the room.