" Since the characterizations herein are my own I should clarify these details absent a second’s further delay. Beginning at its newest beginning, with the matters of today – midday, in fact – with a scene punctuated by the appearance and subsequent felinious capture of the vermin given mention. More benignly put, these particular footsteps were taken by a timid, terrified, adolescent Norway rat who would shortly be christened Twitch. I shall focus forthwith upon those details which emerged moments later – subsequent to his short-lived escape from imminent annihilation by scurrying anew. This time beneath an oaken china cabinet.

In an effort to avoid confiding any facts or details absent direct pertinence to the life-or-death matter at hand, I’ll reveal for the moment only that its precedent had been a similarly random appearance of a rather less fortunate rat 29 years ere and whose ill-fated tale remains snugly entangled within the roots of this one.

Its tangible form began as a spontaneous act of nature that was observed by a 15-year-old dreamer and provoked a flight of fancy which led him to conceive of a grandiose idea that gestated until the man he would become tediously nurtured his evolving purpose into six centuries of historically faithful fables of human survival and struggle ‒ of growth and decay. To put it more tangibly yet ‒ he re-imagined the act of a hungry cat pursuing a frantic rat in the lower Manhattan alleyway in back of his childhood apartment, into an elaborate daydream of a cougar hunting a deer roughly a half-millennia ago. Then ‒ being a born writer ‒ he kicked back in his usual beige folding metal chair, causing its backrest to thud familiarly against the red and gray brick exterior wall behind him; lowered his forest green spiral notebook until it intersected the top front edge of a modest stack of drab-jacketed library books which rested upon his lap and began to transcribe the more fanciful images into a short story.

In it, the cougar’s impending success was interrupted by a handful of natives who’d targeted his prey as their own. Having chosen a 15-year-old Lenape brave named Talli as its protagonist, he likewise conceived a fictional version of himself as the narrator ‒ leading to his eventual conception of peering through the lens of this and subsequent parallel visualizations as chronicled by the successive pens of 40 unique contemporary same-age narrators to detail the human evolution on the island wherein he’d grown up.

On which millions-upon-millions of rats ‒ in near synchronicity with their hosts ‒ had likewise made their home… "

― Monte Souder (Rat Luck: Vol I)