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Plague Doctor Dangling Over the High Bridge, 2025

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"Readers need to eat their way through the dictionaries, then rise as one, with bigger vocabularies. They need to spread their rat wings until the whole collective silhouette is as big as the night sky and starts to bend and distend as something larger begins to sing at a lower frequency, as something smaller begins to beat at a higher rate, as something births its constellation, a clicking, glittering litter.

That's us, who see with shut eyes.

Who open our eyes in the dark."

-- Joyelle McSweeney, How I Became a Rat

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With their trusty sprig of witch hazel, the doctor has developed some peculiar methods to treating patients for their seasonal allergies and irritants. Results thus far have been...inconclusive.

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XXX

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Were I a farmer I would call you vermin

Because you’d be the villain of my crops

And gnaw my wealth, but I am not a farmer,

But only one that walks the farmers’ fields,

And so when I came on your stiffen’d body

Lying alone and flowered with frost, your eyeballs

Glazed and your little front paws so beseeching

Crossed on your breast and pink like human fingers,

And when I saw your deadness in the frozen

Light of the winter morning, I, unmanly,

Unfarmerly, and most impractically

Felt that rats even have a right to live

And knew that there was beauty in your body

Dusted with starry marvels of bright frost,

And beauty in the little hands you crossed

Upon your breast before you died this morning.

Dead Rat, Mervyn Peake

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The Dance of Death ⁣Anonymous - German⁣ 16th Century⁣⁣

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XXX

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Athanasius Kircher, Oedipus Aegyptiacus, 1652

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But as the train pulled from the station, Through the wastelands of despair, From the corner of my eye A brightness filled the filthy air. Someone’s grown a patch of sunflowers, Though the soil is sooty black, Marigolds and a few tomatoes, Right beside the railway track. Down behind the terraced houses, In between the concrete towers, Compost heaps and scarlet runners, Secret gardens full of flowers.

-- A Place Called England (Maggie Holland)