The head fell forward one inch or so and its pupils vanished instantly. I had waited too long. The rodent nervous system had just begun gearing back up. I felt a murderous surge that was uneasy but not entirely unpleasant. Certainly one’s brain must know by maxim: whenever there is blood around, something exciting is probably going on.

The body spasmed and I reflexively dropped it into the sink, making an attractively colored mess with the softly spurting blood. The headless rat scrambled against the stainless steel with full locomotive capability save for the fact that its shoulders had become wedged in the drain. With adrenaline-laced revulsion, I reflexively stepped away from the carnage-spattered sink that still held my total attention. For a few animated seconds this engineered albino, bred over decades for docility, looked as though it were desperate to join–if only for an instant–its agouti brethren of the sewer system. Too be a real rodent, a pest, a scavenging scourge of human waste and decay, a bringer of plagues; but only for a twitching moment, and then it was into the plastic bio-waste bag bound for the hospital incinerator.

"That was a lively one. They aren’t usually that active," she remarked, peeling the fur from the disembodied head and cutting the meat from the back end to gain access to the pecan-sized brain.

I was a killer. I remembered the times I snapped the necks of live brook trout with bare hands and the crab that was boiled alive. I had killed and the action had an effect on me. A rat-sized charge of energy had entered me for just an instant–perhaps merely the atavistic dopaminergic reward of a hunter or perhaps the animal’s soul passing, ether-bound, though my electric nervous system.

Illustrated by Amy Jarrell