began as an ordinary rodent
gray, uninteresting
even to others of his kind.
One day city officials decided
to clean their filthy subway system
and thought it best to show a film
of rats scurrying over the tracks.
As a curious guy,
he attended an audition
as did a thousand other rats,
when they got to him, he was
famished, and they knew it.
So they threw a slice of pizza
on a stairway step, and he went
after it like a mad dog, dragged
that thing down the stairs and
took it with him. They loved it,
even though it was an out-take.
And that’s what made him famous,
but things haven’t gone so well
lately, all he got hired for was
stacking small lotion bottles
at a pharmacy overnight, though
as a rat, his daytime job is
predicting subway arrivals
by feeling for track vibrations,
never lost his touch.
Gene Goldfarb lives in Manhattan, a recent transplant from Long Island. His passions are reading, writing both poetry and prose, movies of all kinds, and travel. His work has appeared in Black Fox, Misfit Magazine, Green Briar, Quiddity, The Daily Drunk, and elsewhere.