The man who was rats was definitely not a man. Or, at least, he was more rat than man. Absolutely not more man than rat. He had an undeniable man-shape, at least from a distance. Two arms, two legs, and so on.
But up close, something wasn’t right. If you looked right at a particular part of him – the arm for example – you would soon notice that the sleeve rippled and pulsated, quite unlike a sleeve should move. More like a sleeve worn by something other than human flesh. Something which liked to run, and shift, and slip from grasp. And possibly to gnaw.
His head seemed human enough. He had a strange, glazed look in his eyes – sort of like a person sleeping with their eyes open, if you’ve seen that. You know in movies, where someone dies with their eyes open, and whoever else is in the room feels obligated to close the corpse’s eyelids on their behalf, because the dead person can’t? Kind of like that. But also like an open-eyed sleeper.
You’d see no discernible traces of recognition, looking into those eyes. You couldn’t tell for sure whether your gaze was being returned, or simply eaten up.
So there was the head, with dirty dark-brown hair, pale skin, and those empty eyes. But then below that… There was a sort of neck. A vague impression of a neck, you might say. The bottom of the head, the chin, etc, it joined onto the body somehow. After all, it couldn’t simply be floating there. If there was one body and one head, it stood to reason that they belonged to each other, and had some kind of coupling point – a neck – but it was difficult to pinpoint with the naked eye. No matter how hard you squinted.
He didn’t respond when you called his name. Or, at least, he gave me the impression that he wouldn’t have responded, if any of us knew his name. Someone said they’d gone through his pockets and found a wallet, but no ID. A few coins, and a photograph of a dog. A really old photograph. It looked like memorabilia from the ‘40s. He certainly wasn’t old enough for that, but maybe he was into that kind of thing. A collector. A collector of something....
He walked from place to place with a peculiar, scrambling gait, quite unlike the rest of us. As if his limbs were being controlled by many different people, each of whom had a totally different idea of what human walking was supposed to look like. Needless to say, he didn’t walk fast, or far.
It eventually became clear that he was just a set of clothing, filled with rats to approximate the human-shape within. The head perched on top was probably dead – or, worse, still alive somehow – and controlled by the colony of rats inside the false body.
But this notion only came to me years later, long after I’d moved away from the area. I’d lost contact with everyone I knew from back there. Had half a mind to ask around, get a phone number, find out the truth.
But truth is uncertain at best, invisible at worst, and usually somewhere in between. Foggy. And who says a bunch of rats wearing a human-costume don’t deserve to participate in human society, if they really, truly want to? They aren’t hurting anyone. At least, no more than we’re hurting ourselves.