Kill the Rat: Indifference—A Cure and a Disease by Miracle Ididi

What drove him to kill a man? They all argued while circled

around a table of whiskey and dishes. The lot said he was a

psychopath; others said he had lost his mind, for he pulled

the trigger seven times and had looked upon the man with no

remorse, and when he had been asked, replied that the coffee

he drank a moment before had burnt his tongue. "He must be a

man with no heart," they all agreed, with nodding their heads.

That day, another life was lost, or it must have been lost a long

time ago. On July 4th of 2004, a rat he had brought home and refused

to do away with when his parents insisted, chewed through his father's

important certificates and other documents. So his

father despised him. That was the year his mother started

smoking pot. That was the year his father lost his job, and he

was taken to Grandma Rita, and he was bullied in school, and

he repeated a class twice, and Grandma Rita died of old age, and

his parents got divorced, and his father drank too much, and

his mother started working at a brothel, and he caught his girl cheating,

and he drank his coffee too quick that he had burnt his own tongue.

It is so that a man doesn't lose all hope of being human

because of a certain event. It is usually the accumulation

of similar events, of little setbacks, little failures,

little misfortune, when, if all summed up, becomes a gargantuan

mountain that drives a man to insanity. For when man and life

are placed on a circus to fight, all physical advantage is to life,

while all that lies beyond the physical realm, which is greater

than the physical, is to the man. Yet man is unaware of this.

That is the advantage life has on him. So as when life sends his

weakest soldier, a home built with years of love slowly starts

crumbling. And man becomes indifferent in thinking, by perceiving

everything as insignificant or meaningless, then

he has triumphed over life, when, in actual discernment of matters

beyond the physical realm, he is merely being held captive by

darkness.

On that night, he had felt all that was burning in his life,

and when the stranger had approached him with the word "friend,"

was a single tick of the clock after he had burnt his tongue.

So he killed the man, not exactly because of the burn

or the coffee,

but because, in 2004, there was a rat in his home that changed

everything. He killed the man because he said "friend."

He killed the man because he saw a rat and didn't see a man,

because he was trying to end another turn of events before

it even started,

because when he got the burn, the last light in his head went off,

because many other lights had been going off before it

resulted in the last, because at that moment the light went

out, It was darkness, total void, of emptiness and nothingness,

a culmination of all that has transpired, of all perilous and meticulous,

malevolent tragedies.

He killed a man because he was putting out a fire,

because he saw a rat, biggest in its form,

and with great indifference,

he ended the rat.

Miracle Ididi is a Nigerian writer who explores multiple genres with poetry being her major. She is a student, a therapist, a philosopher and on most days, she's just a girl.