Eyes Like Black Pearls

By Charles Rocha

First published on April 4, 2023, International Rat Day, this is the long-awaited sequel to Lo, the Mighty Rat! Here, as in the first book, you will find a quirky collection of stories, articles, and other works inspired by rats, interspersed with poems and high-quality photos. This volume is packed with material that cannot be found anywhere else. For example, you learn how to identify the signs of rat addiction, set up a rat-tour business in your city, and engage effectively in rat activism. Also included is a journal of the remarkable lives (and some deaths) of the author’s thirteen rats in Dnipro, Ukraine, picking up where the last book left off a year ago. Even if you have never owned rats or are only curious about them, you may find yourself amused by the controversial viewpoints of this author regarding rats. And if you already own rats, you may never see your little beloved ones in the same way after you finish this book!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Charles Rocha
• Release date: Apr 4, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215580158

Charles Rocha

Charles Rocha is a graduate of Central Washington University in Ellensburg, Washington, with a B.A. in English and an M.A. in British Literature. Currently he works as an ESL instructor in the city of Dnipro, Ukraine. He has had stories and essays published in small journals and online story websites.

Book preview

Eyes Like Black Pearls

Eyes Like Black Pearls

A Collection of Works Inspired by Rats

By Charles Rocha

Copyright © 2023 by Charles Rocha

Published by Charles Rocha at Smashwords

ISBN 9798215580158 (epub version)

Cover photo and design by Charles Rocha: Jimmie (2023)

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Contents

Preface

Thirteen Rats Thirteen – A Memoir

More Rats in the Headlines

The Ghost Rat

The Mighty Acorn

Rat Games & Activities

Shadow the Rat

Forty-Four Ways to Celebrate Rat Day

Rat Questions

Rats by the Numbers

Rat Poetry

A Rat Fairy Tale

Twelve Rats Twelve – A Memoir

Rat Addiction

Rat Activism

Rat Tourism

More Rat Wisdom

Your Rat Warranty Card

The Rainbow Bridge – A Memoir

Regrets – A Memoir

Eight Rats Eight – A Memoir

Guests from the Past? – A Memoir

Late Night Call

The Five-Year Rat Program

One More Thing

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Other Books by this Author

Preface

What you have here is a sequel to the previously published rat book, Lo, the Mighty Rat. Mostly, this is a memoir of my experiences with my rats, interspersed with some poetry and a few rat-themed stories and articles thrown in. If you opened this volume expecting to read something else, you should close the file now and move on. The label on the tin really does reflect the contents.

One might ask, of all things in the world, why would anyone publish a book about his experiences with rats? Talking at length about one’s pets at a dinner party is sure to elicit yawns and glazed stares. But between the coronavirus pandemic and the ongoing war in Ukraine, which is where I live, I’ve spent an extraordinarily large amount of time observing my rats in their natural social environment here and have made some startling (at least to me) discoveries about their behavior. From this, I have drawn some conclusions about their psychology and spiritual nature, which I believe lends insight into our own human existence.

Although this book stands on its own as an independent work, I recommend you first read Lo, the Mighty Rat. In that book, you will be introduced to the characters discussed here and how they came to be, along with the background mythology. And as for the somewhat cliché title of this book, Eyes Like Black Pearls, if you’ve ever owned or loved rats, you totally understand why the title is appropriate.

Charles Rocha, April 4, 2023

Thirteen Rats Thirteen – A Memoir

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen. Thirteen rats. How did I get this many? Well, it wasn’t intended. I bred a few of my rats, and I wasn’t able to sell all of the pups before they got old enough. Everybody wants to buy a baby rat, after all.

As I write this, I have lived in Ukraine for almost 20 years. All in all, they were uneventful years. I live in the city of Dnipro, in central Ukraine. I am the director of an English school that I founded back in 2007. Also, I teach.

Last year, only two days after I published Lo, the Mighty Rat!, Russia invaded Ukraine. Unlike my American friends in this country and many of my students, I remained. Nowadays, life has resumed some normalcy.

When the air raid siren goes off, I go down to the bomb shelter. It’s a long way from my apartment—five minutes to get there. I live on the fifth floor of a building without an elevator. I cannot take all eleven rats with me. They have to stay alone in the apartment, at the mercy of whatever comes their way. When I return, sometimes a few hours later, the rats look at me with expressions that seem to ask, Why did you leave so suddenly? Where did you go so late in the night? Are you all right? and sometimes, Why didn’t you stay with us? We knew all along that everything was going to be okay.

The bomb shelter for my apartment block is a dreary place. Perhaps it was all right 70 years ago when the building was built, but time and the theft of all the fixtures have made it unpleasant. To give you an idea of the conditions, here is a photo I furtively snapped of some of my neighbors in the shelter during an air raid warning:

Bomb Shelter

Also consider the fact that this place is unheated and feels (and smells) very damp. At least Wi-Fi worked, so while we were there, we could at least distract ourselves by reading news about the war on our phones.

As it was during the coronavirus era, I was unemployed for a while until the situation became the new normal. During this period, I had a lot of idle time on my hands. I wasn’t able to go anywhere or do anything. So I was left alone in my apartment with my rats. That gave me a lot of free time to observe and interact with them.

Things were very tense for a long time. I had no idea, as did anyone else, whether there would soon be Russian tanks rumbling down the streets of Dnipro. Pitched battles were raging to the north, east, and south of my city. Although the Ukrainian army fought valiantly, the Russians were slowly advancing, destroying cities in the process.

Several times a day, the air raid siren sounded, compelling everyone to go to the bomb shelters. Usually, no missiles arrived. Sometimes, they did. When it happened, the sound was terrifying. I still have major cracks in the thick brick front wall of my apartment, the result of two powerful missile strikes last summer that obliterated an open-air market only a kilometer from me. (The Russians were probably aiming for the police headquarters across the street from the market, but they missed it—twice.)

Only a few months later did the tide of the war begin to turn in earnest, heralded by this video clip on CNN news announcing that Ukraine had finally received the HIMARS missile system from the US:

A secret location. A precious weapon. A High-Mobility Artillery Rocket System, or HIMARS. A powerful gift from the United States to Ukraine…

In the background of the clip, you see a HIMARS launcher on a road in a rural, wooded area, firing rockets into the evening sky.

The arrival of the HIMARS was a major game changer; the fortunes of the Russians changed after that. They haven’t advanced much since then, and Ukraine has even managed to take back some huge swaths of occupied territory.

As I write this, the war is still raging in the south and east. We still have martial law in this city. The air raid sirens wail several times daily. There is always the threat of a missile strike. I could lose everything I own in an hour, including my life. Despite all that, I’ve managed to acclimate myself to the situation. My life has become more or less routine, and I am again able to work and live as I wish, despite the ever-present danger.

But this isn’t a book about me or my experiences in Ukraine per se. This is a book about rats—the Ukrainian sort. It is composed of stories, poems, and miscellanea that were inspired by them.

Actually, I was going to combine this book with a memoir on my life in Ukraine, but I could already predict a future review of this book, even before it was written: Great book on Ukraine, but he should have left out the rats. After the war, I may write a book on my experiences here in Ukraine, but there’s still a ways to go before we get there.

It can be said that my rats are Americanized Ukrainian rats. They understand English and respond to my English words. I will tell you they are no less kind and more loving than any other living being found anywhere on the globe. Just like Ukrainians. Of course, there are bad Ukrainians (like the ones who burglarized my apartment a few years ago) and good ones. But, according to my assessment, the vast majority of Ukrainians are good people. And I love them with all my heart, no less than I love my rats. And that is a very tall statement, if you know me.

It’s rare that I meet someone who understands my fascination with my rats. Sometimes I wonder whether I live in a dimension that is slightly removed from everyone else’s. When I meet people who are not acquainted with rats, it’s hard to predict who will or won’t like them and whether their opinion will change over time once they become acquainted with some.

Take, for example, my ex-girlfriend Valeria. While we were together, she told me many times that if I had told her I had rats on our first date, there wouldn’t have been a second date. At the end of our relationship, about three years later, she had sixteen rats (or so) the last time I talked to her. She cooks them cheese and spinach omelettes and feeds them fresh salmon as a snack. She also adopts unwanted rats, is very active in online rat forums, and makes a good living selling high-quality rat food online. And this is a person who’d never had a pet in her life before she got rats.

Another example is one of my students named Sergey. He was part of a group of five bank managers to whom I gave online English lessons once per week. He was a big, serious fellow who always seemed to smirk whenever I mentioned my rats during the lessons. Anyway, his two young sons somehow heard about my rats. During the coronavirus epidemic, he adopted two of Alvey’s brothers. The kids quickly lost interest in the rats, so Sergey ended up taking care of them. When the war started, his wife and kids went abroad as refugees, leaving Sergey alone with the two rats. During this time, he bonded with them. Even though my lessons with his group had long ended, and I lost contact with him, Valeria kept in touch with him, selling him rat food. She told me that one day he called her when one of the two rats, the passive one, got very sick—and he was in tears over it. I would never have expected that from him. Anyway, the rat got better, and his family later returned from abroad. The last I heard, the rats were now considered members of the family. And even his wife, who had disliked the rats, now loved them.

I also have other stories of people’s lives being transformed by owning rats.

As for me, I just find it relaxing to spend time with my rats. Sometimes, I play with them or pet them. Other times, I’ll just sit on the couch and watch them interact with each other. That’s how we span time together. One day flows into the next, and the weeks just slip by. Quietly, meditatively. The war and the problems of the world can’t touch us. I used to feel anxious and depressed a lot. I rarely feel that way anymore since I started owning rats.

But am I really a rat owner? The word owner implies that I possess something that I can do anything with. In my view, I do not own rats except in the sense that I own the responsibility for their care. I do share PETA’s sentiment that animals cannot be regarded as possessions. Therefore, I prefer to think of myself as a rat guardian. My responsibility is to love them, protect them, and help them on their spiritual journey, as many of my fellow humans have done for me.

So, for the purposes of this book, whenever I refer to rat ownership, let it be known that I’m referring to the ownership of the responsibility for their care. That is, care as a guardian. I accept that I can no more own my rats than I could own a spouse or child. In my particular case, for as much as I dote on my rats and put so many of my resources into their happiness and health, one could even argue that they own me. All the same, the vast majority of the time they run loose on their table, interacting with each other and doing whatever they like without my interference. They are rats first, pets second.

At the time of this writing, I have thirteen rats. They are, in order of birth or acquaintance: Chloe, Max, Henry, Alvey, Brinna, Zoe, Sarah, Jimmie, Felix, Reggie, Marx, Engels, and Lenin. All were introduced in the first book. Before this book concludes a year from now, it is certain that some of them will no longer be with me.

It’s always fascinating to me how they interact with each other and individually relate to one another. For example, last night, Engels and Reggie had a little fight. Engels is easily offended, and Reggie was poorly brought up. This is not a very good combination. Something happened between them under the cage, and they got very angry with each other. Their fur stood on end, and they chased each other a lot. I had to keep separating them so that they would not bite each other.

Alvey, if he were still the alpha rat, would have interfered. It was his character. Felix, the current alpha rat, is more relaxed in his approach to leading the mischief. He usually doesn’t interfere if it doesn’t concern him. If annoyed, he just kicks the offending rat out of the cage and then ignores him.

Felix has also fought Reggie in the past. Just because they’re fighting doesn’t mean one of them wants to be the new alpha. Sometimes they just get annoyed with each other in the same way people do with each other, family not withstanding.

Following is a description of my rats as they were in February 2022:

Chloe

Her love like the Northern Star, never-changing,

We cannot help but find her amazing,

Chloe the rat with all her winsome ways,

Is the light that brightens up our days.

Chloe in Cage

Chloe is a medium-sized agouti female. She’s the daughter of Trixie and the sister of Floxie, both of whom passed away last year. Her father is unknown. I got her from a local pet shop, where she was kept in a dirty, crowded cage. She was nearly an adult when I brought her home and was scarcely socialized. It took a few months to socialize her. Of the three that I brought home, she ended up trusting me the most.

Chloe had a big litter of 14 pups with Theo. Afterward, I had her spayed so that she could live with the male rats without getting pregnant again.

Chloe is well-loved by all the other female rats and sought after for sex by all the males, even in her old age! She has an especially close bond with her son Max and another rat I bought later, Brinna.

Max

When Max entered the world, they broke the mold.

Just a simple black and white with a heart of gold,

No other rat is so noble and so pure

A patriarch whose line will forever endure.

Max in Cage