Fiction
Where the Concrete Meets the Sandby D. C. Benny
As I sat in the church pew, looking off at the body, I thought about my first rat, the one Pop made me kill on Christmas Eve, nineteen seventy four.
I was seven years old, and he’d cornered it in the basement of the crumbling brownstone apartment where we lived.
I’d felt naked, no shirt, pajama pants, barefoot, my clammy hands choking up the bat he’d placed into them, a nail driven through the fat part at the end of it.
The rat was intermittently pacing and squeaking, knowing what was coming. Pop stood, hands in pockets; “Do it quick, Samson, before he jumps on you”.
A section of his afro, flat on one side from sleep, what mom called “nappy interrupted”, almost touched the hot, bare light bulb.
He was so big to me back then, it
