A Secret from Our Marriage

We told no one about the first rat. We had moved into a fixer upper
and were ambitious in the abilities we wanted to develop. Tools were
bought. Paint was mixed. Finally, one day when we were trying to fix
the railing of the porch, a rat ran out from under the steps and the porch
collapsed. We had fallen in love quickly, deeply, after years of us each
wandering off alone into the cardinal directions where our minds
pointed. When we wed, our parents and friends had exhaled. We were
excused from the chessboard of worry. After the porch collapsed,
more lumber was purchased, and rat traps. A rat got caught in a trap
one night and at the same moment, a bookshelf fell off the wall. When
the tiny metal bar next slammed down on gray fur, a window cracked.
Were the rats holding the house together or abandoning it? We
brought in a specialist who said rats could make themselves as thin as
a nickel, could enter the smallest spaces such as the one between two
people supposedly madly in love. We lived there a long time, not
fixing things.

Hilary King is a poet originally from Virginia now living in the San Francisco Bay Area of California. Her poems have appeared or will appear in Ploughshares, Salamander, TAB, Belletrist, SWWIM, Fourth River, The Cortland Review, and other publications. She is the author of the book of poems, The Maid’s Car, serves an editor for DMQ Review, and is a Steinbeck Fellow at San Jose State University, where she is a graduate student in the MFA program.

Published January 15 2024