Teresa Milbrodt, Fictioneer

Only one month to go before the release of my flash fiction collection, Larissa Takes Flight: Stories.  Leading up to the launch, I’ll be posting a few Larissa stories that don’t appear in the book (and will therefore be exclusive to my blog).  Enjoy!

Larissa and the Latest Scientific Study

 Last week I read a report that said plastics will kill me by eating my liver or f*cking up my hormones or something equally treacherous, and I realized the miracle of science is that it invents great conveniences that destroy us and cause humanity to wonder if it was so bad in those African grasslands after we came down from trees to hunt prehistoric steaks with huge teeth. Yesterday that was the story of our lives, the lions would get us, but now it’s chemicals in water jugs and tainted peaches and the inside of tomato sauce cans and whatever toxin the company down the road dumped into the river last night, but because we’re advanced we can conduct studies on how everything may or may not kill us but at least it kills rats, those unwilling martyrs, and perhaps every town should have a monument outside the post office, a fist-sized silver rat on a pedestal so we remember how we produce bottles and bottles of water, then give the water to rats and see if they die. If you’ve ever met anyone who had a rat as a pet you know they can go on for hours about how rats are people too, so sweet and intelligent, but the rest of the world knows a rat by any other name belongs in a cage winding through mazes for cheese, and maybe what we need is a Disney movie where girl rat meets boy rat and they fall in rat love, then boy rat eats a peanut butter cookie laced with the latest cancer-treating drug and his liver gets dissected (but that’s off camera), and six-year-olds won’t care that he donated his body to science because he was so darn cute and endearing and in love with the girl rat who in her grief consumes so much tainted bread that she explodes. But people say it’s the rats or us, and we do this a lot with life, create and extinguish, create and extinguish, so we can saturate ourselves with the knowledge of contemporary dangers, but how many little lives equal a person? It’s impossible math, because how many of us would say, Sure, I’ll be the first to try that new experimental medication. How many would say, I didn’t care much about my liver anyway. How many would say, I think I’ll go climb a tree because things were simpler up there.