Being at supper

Will Landschulz
Am Lit Per. 2
Mrs. LaMagdeleine

When Joe starts to nod off, he suddenly feels a rat, crawling over him, grinning in anticipation of a great feast.  As Joe has no limbs with which to fend off the vermin, there is literally nothing he can do to remove it except scream for the nurse loudly and continuously.  What makes it worse is that if the rat escapes, Joe's sentient but rotting carcass would be too big of a temptation for the rat, therefore it will come again on the next night, and the night after that, and the night after that, and so on and so forth until his mind breaks with anxiety and his body disappears down the rat's gullet, one tiny bit at a time.  But the new day comes, and the rat disappears with the nurse's entrance, back into that place where nightmares call home, back into memory and overripe imagination.  The rat itself came from a delectable feast of Prussian noncommisioned officer, after it took refuge in an enemy dugout where Joe's troop killed it.  And now its memory has come back to Joe in revenge.  To the reader, the rat reeks of dementia, the madness of staying in a sensory deprivation chamber, the vision of invented smells, imagined noises, and conceived touches.  It comes to Joe because some part of himself is decaying along with his missing limbs, worked into madness through frustration, but not removed from Joe's working mind like his limbs were.