Rats

Rats enter the narrative through Virginia’s memory of a summer cottage and return as a mistaken threat when she wakes in darkness. The animal she recalls had made a home inside the house; its nest and eventual death became bound to the collapse of Virginia’s marriage. Later, a sound from Virginia’s own airways makes that buried memory feel present again, joining the old household story to her newly awakened body.

The cottage and the hidden nest

Virginia remembers a cottage she and Per, Lena’s father, rented for a couple of summers when Lena was little. While the family was away, Rats had made a nest beneath the kitchen counter. The construction was made from pieces of a milk carton and a cornflakes packet, assembled into a small shelter of colored cardboard. The nest is not described merely as evidence of an infestation: Virginia recalls it as a delicate structure made by a creature living unseen inside the family’s temporary home.

When Virginia vacuumed up the nest, she felt guilty and experienced the act as a kind of transgression. The animal’s concealed domestic life had acquired, in her imagination, the character of a good spirit. That response complicates the practical distinction between household and intruder: the nest is refuse to be removed, but also the trace of a life that had been established there in the family’s absence.

Poisoning and the end of the summer

The animal was not caught in the traps. It continued eating the family’s dry goods even after the family returned during the summer, and Per put out rat poison. Virginia and Per argued about this and about other matters; the account does not reduce their conflict to a single cause. The animal eventually died somewhere inside the wall, out of sight.

Its death became inseparable from the household’s larger deterioration. The smell from the body spread through the cottage as Virginia and Per’s marriage slowly broke down. They left a week earlier than planned because they could no longer bear either the smell or one another. Virginia’s memory thus links the unseen animal’s death to an ending in her own domestic life: the nest first prompts guilt at its destruction, while the animal’s concealed death accompanies the family’s departure and the loss of the summer’s shared refuge.

The remembered animal returns

When Virginia later wakes, she initially cannot see even after opening her eyes. Her consciousness has returned, but the surrounding darkness makes the room difficult to distinguish. The recollection of the cottage rat supplies an image for the sense that something else had occupied her in the interval. The memory moves from a hidden inhabitant of a house to a hidden presence associated with Virginia herself; this is an imaginative connection, not evidence that an actual animal is in the room.

A squeaking, hissing sound then seems to confirm her fear that an animal is under the blankets. Virginia panics, tumbles out of the bed while still wrapped up, and struggles free. From a corner, she watches the green blanket with blue dots, expecting movement. The scene briefly turns the remembered household threat into a present one, but the apparent rat is not there.

Virginia recognizes that the sound is her breathing. Before falling asleep, she had determined that she was not breathing; now air passing through her dried-out passages produces the noise she had mistaken for an animal. After clearing her throat, she remembers everything. She examines her arms, sees dried blood but no visible cuts or scars, and checks the time: it is a quarter past six in the evening. The return to bodily awareness corrects the immediate misreading, while leaving the old rat memory active in the scene.

A domestic image for hidden life

The episode’s force comes from the recurrence of concealment. In Virginia’s memory, the animal lives beneath a counter, builds unseen, and dies inside a wall; on waking, Virginia imagines it concealed within the bedclothes. Each setting contains a presence that cannot initially be seen, and the movement from remembered cottage to dark bedroom allows domestic fear to become a way of apprehending what is hidden.

The comparison also holds two responses together. Virginia once felt that destroying the nest meant expelling a good spirit, yet the animal’s continued presence in the cottage led Per to use poison. Her recollection preserves both the sympathy she felt for the creature and the practical conflict it caused. When the rat seems to return in the bedroom, the threat dissolves into the sound of Virginia’s own breathing. Rats therefore serve not only as remembered pests, but as an image through which the narrative makes a concealed presence legible—and then reveals that the source of the immediate fear is Virginia’s own body.