Home > Author > Monte Souder (Rat Luck)
1 " When it is pleasant enough – or at minimum if remaining yet hopeful – one's unfolding fate might be received as effortlessly as a slice of freshly baked Dutch apple pie just prior to nibbling upon its point. If you did not know it, it is the one crowned with streusel – a crumbly topping of flour, butter, brown sugar and cinnamon – all offsetting an underlayer of relatively crisp, tart apple slices; rather than the simple pastry lid which lies atop a sweeter variety.An encounter with a previously unthinkable misfortune is quite another matter.Despite the inherent foresight that each of us possess regarding the inevitable calamities awaiting every passage along life's journey, the willingness to cherish a destiny in its totality across one’s lifetime not only necessitates the wisdom of reflection but even then, acquiring the foolishness to trust an incomprehensible unknown.This may begin with the simple acknowledgment that rats are far better swimmers than nearly any child and a significantly higher number of the latter than you’d surely wish to recognize have suffered the very same misery which befell Hamelin’s rodents in the later sanitized adaptations of the reportedly based-upon-fact piper legend. "
― Monte Souder (Rat Luck)
2 " Alvin lifted his toes and pushed both heels firmly into the asphalt until his folding metal chair thudded familiarly against the brick wall behind him. It did so in the same manner as on myriad other occasions. A manner that had caused his mother to scold him more times than he cared to remember. She had stopped bothering to do so months earlier however. By then, he'd transferred more beige paint to the bricks behind him than remained on the crossbar at the top of its backrest.At least that's what she told him soon before giving up. She would have likely been correct too, if not for the rain which so frequently showered the very same wall. In Alvin's keen mind, it was better this way. Once some unblemished new thing had lost its perfection he reasoned, it ceased posing a burden of concern ‒ particularly to observant mothers. "
3 " Within its pages were row-upon-row of dark impressions; marked one-by-one by an array of blows arising from a basket of clustered steel typebars cast with embossed slugs upon their tips ‒ striking in sequential forward arcs, as if inhabited by a crew of nether-situated Lilliputians sitting side-by-side; wielding slender embossed hammers, forged character-by-character to smash against pigment-impregnated woven black ribbons; poised in turn overtop a seemingly endless succession of lily-white storyteller's leaves; each a direct byproduct of majestically beautiful, seasonally fragrant, faintly audible, partly edible, often climbable; utterly tangible trees ‒ its outer layer of fifteen pages having chronicled the antecedent evoked by this very beginning more than 400 billion harvested timber ago.So then to be more succinct, Nate’s story began again with yet another scurrying rat…In truth such recurrences aren't so terribly peculiar, though it may be altogether unsurprising if one were inclined to suppose otherwise. All things being equal, it would be no more and no less improbable than if each lad had been party to analogous cat encounters across this same interval of time. And ‒ as further happenstance would have it ‒ this is likewise, indeed one more similarly entwined detail connecting these distinct yet equally primal matters.Conceding that all things are rarely equal, of course.For instance it may be instructive to consider that rattus norvegicus tend toward predictable timidity while in striking contrast the felines in question were both tomcats ‒ often being prone to flouncing about in the manner of plumeless peacocks; if not pouncing onto the nearest familiar lap like typical felis catus.Nevertheless ‒ particularly given its generation spanning interlude ‒ such dual coincidence might be more fittingly viewed as a long past due inevitability. This owing to a perpetual abundance within the local feline population; the billions upon billions of rats that are right now scurrying to and fro in more places on this planet than you have likely imagined to exist; as well as an innate magnetism drawing the former to the latter ‒ as earnestly as that of a type hammer chasing a blank page. Then at last, to acknowledge that myriad and unstated goings-on must precede each beginning of every story. "
4 " His story began with a scurrying rat… "
