We moved three times when I was young.
The first time was to a Victorian Terrace in Toxteth, Liverpool.
It had an outside toilet, a coal —bunker, and rooms you could still refer to as a parlor and vestibule.
Of course it was pretty dilapidated, and as more of the neighborhood tenants moved out, leaving the adjacent houses vacant, the rodents moved in.
My hysterical, irrational fear of rats began there.
I would have been five when, upon investigating a tapping noise in the electric meter cupboard, a large, brown rat fell as unceremoniously—as only a rat can—into my lap.
Its pink wormlike tail twitched, as a bubble of spittle and blood formed on its greasy, gray lips, from the poison it had ingested.
In that moment I felt an epiphany, as all of my understanding of what it meant to die, seemed crystalline in the revulsion and horror I felt from that point in those black, beaded eyes that rolled to yellow-white, I realized that death had a face.
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