Rats have just entered the stone age for some reason read the text notification on Heinrich’s watch. He could almost hear Jessica’s raspy voice and the way the statement must have ended in a question-like inflection of tone. It made his head hurt. Well, not exactly. It was the hangover that made his head hurt but the text from Jessica didn’t really help. It was 7 am. Did she sleep in the lab again? What’s wrong with this person? Stone age though — that’s fast — way too fast. What exactly does she mean by stone age — I hope she didn’t see a mound of turd and thought it looked like the stonehenge or something. These fucking go-getters.
Heinrich turned to his side and reached out his hairy arm to the half-empty glass of water and proceeded to gulp it down. The salty taste of the electrolyte solution was just the right thing to make his morning worse. He filled the glass with fresh clear water from the just next to it and chugged it. It felt much better. Now then, back to the stone age.
“What do you mean?” he wrote. He paused for a second, discarded the message, wrote “What exactly do you see?” , hit sent and exhaled.
Jessica was certainly not his first pick but he needed someone to do the work and with the department’s budget, the pickings were slim. Jessica was slim but also an undergrad and had an annoyingly raspy voice. The piece that doesn’t make sense is why an undergrad hired to clean out rat cages for food money and a chance to ‘experience research’ would be putting in so much more. You can’t drive life scooched all the way to the wheel — you’re gonna have no idea what long term decisions look like. Perspective — she needs to fucking relax so she can get some perspective. Jesus Christ.
Ding! It was a photo message from Jessica. After waving the damn phone around a few times and with it still failing to recognize his face, he gave up and typed in his passcode and got in the phone. In the the photo was Animal 886- a New York city rat in the experimental group — standing up balancing on his hind legs. Rats do that whenever they need to reach up to get something but they don’t hold the posture for long. In front of the rat was a pile of pebbles neatly arranged in a circular pattern. In the middle of the circle was what seemed to be a pyramid of rocks. Six rocks in the bottom row, three rocks balanced in the dips between the six rocks, and one rock balanced in the dip between the three to make a pyramid.
“He built it himself — between 4 and 6 am — I checked the footage.” Another message.
Coffee. Heinrich needed coffee before he could process this. A warm double espresso would be really nice.
The next message that arrived had a 10 second clip where the rat seemed to look directly at the camera, stand up on his hind legs and wave his arms around to try and balance himself.
<Most Dangerous Writing App Set to 500 words. Redding Writing Prompts — wife chose the prompt for the day. First writing session in a while — completing = Winning Bigly. >
