“You did well in your previous life, my friend.”
Magawa looked up into the smiling face of the King of Rats, who sat in an ancient rocking chair made of teeth-hewn cypress. As he rocked, the Rat King looked at those assembled around, he and Magawa, who thought there must have been hundreds of other rats staring at him.
A Persian slinked into my office. She looked at me with big blue eyes. “I hear you solve problems,” she purred.
“What’s the trouble, kitten?” I asked.
“I’ve lost my mittens,” she yowled.
The little beady-eyed creep irritated the hell out of me. If he hadn’t been one heck of a technician, I would have had him transferred to another department. Much as I liked to hear the figures on the monitors squeal, prolonged listening got old pretty quickly.
Sally Miller ker-plunked her nickel down on the marble counter top and waited for Mr. Klopman to finish with his customer. He wore a red wool stocking cap to keep his bald head warm, but the strangest thing about him was his eyes. Each one pointed toward his nose and he wore eyeglasses as thick as coke bottles which made them look even bigger.
Annie loved the dregs of frothy coffee – the homemade kind that you get in a long, skinny packet. Every morning, I would finish my coffee, wait for the froth to cool and then place the cup on its side in the cage. Having awakened Annie with a gentle scritch, I watched delightedly as she slowly cleaned up every skerrick of her treat. Those memories are very precious, because last week, Annie died.
My name is Vivaldi and I am a handsome, upstanding member of the rodent community. People say I'm fat, but I'm only 900 grams. Quite sylph-like, really.
The first time I met Cherokee–Kee for short–he was lumbering up and down on the top of the cages of his "mates," all of whom he would have torn limb from limb if he got the chance.
Lucas agreed to foster care until Mom finished Chemo, that was only fair, but it wasn't fair to pick on Piecrust. So what if he was ornery. Fourteen feline years meant eighty human years. He'd already used up more than twenty of his nine lives, at least. Lucas swore he could live forever, but a few weeks in a cattery would kill him. Lucas couldn't take the chance and vowed to keep him safe.
Perious Mouse took his seat beside Felicity Mouse, at the steering wheel of the wind buggy and flipped the tinted goggles on his flying cap down over his beady black eyes. The excitement was palpable in the barnyard and hardly a whisper could be heard from anyone except Piggy-Pig, who had managed to tip over the slop bucket in her pig pen.
Drusilla Kehl is well known in rat circles for her art work of rats, mice and other animals. Here at KRL we have used several of her pieces to illustrate rat related stories/articles. But I knew very little about her and thought it would be fun to find out how. Hope all you rat and/or art lovers out there enjoy getting to know this talented artist a little bit more. The art throughout this article is all Drusilla's.
