“Agreed.”
I hung up. My heart was beating fast. I was angry and sad and shaking. To calm myself, I started thinking about rats.
With a rat, it’s all about the bait. A hunk of cheese works fine in cartoons, but not real life. Peanut butter with an oat stashed in the middle is the ticket. It’s the thing that takes him out of their game and into yours, without him knowing that you’re doing it.
The peanut butter is the draw, but the main course is the oat. It stirs that primal urge to gnaw, and the gnawing creates just a little bit more motion.
It’s always the Greed that gets you. We all have it, somewhere in us, gurgling like the underground spring on Third Street, beneath the Park Slope brownstones, waiting for something to tap into it.
Rat tombstone epitaph: “The oat was all she wrote.
