When the rats appeared, our wombs withered. Only Inez managed to maintain her roundness. The mayor said the creatures crept up from the river, but we suspected otherwise. Only fish and snails come up from the waterways. Rats cannot hold their breath for long; they rose up from the hole past the river, down underways, where we left so much to rot. 

We’d buried so many things underways, we no longer could remember them all. We were only certain of grandfather’s bones and broken eggshells, stale chicken feed and the handful of coins the mayor received for informing the gallivanting mob that the witch lived one village over, in fact. We buried the ash as it floated over the next evening. When Mary’s swollen belly produced a stone, we wept with her and submerged it underways, so none of us would have to look at it again. We buried pocketwatches when we no longer trusted time to be honest. And we buried the rats, so many rats; their heads smashed under heel or poison threading through their veins, but there were always more. They always came back. 

That first night, the rats came amidst the fog. Not a single soul saw them, snuggled in our beds with our windows shut, but Olivia was in the square before the sun rose, wailing that she had been touched in the night. We all looked furiously at Simeon the pervert, but Olivia said it was not human hands which brushed against her cheek and eyelids. The sensation frightened her so badly she lost control, and everything inside of her—the meal of potato and leek from the night before, three cups of wine, and a bladder full of sour piss—came rushing out.  It was an augur of an end, but we did not recognize it.

“It’s the water,” the mayor announced. “Full of pests. Absolutely rank.”

We avoided drinking from the river, and only trusted the well. But Sarah and June and Mia and Elenor’s wombs rotted even so. The almost-babies came out attached to tubes that were meant for ichor and digestion, and there was no way to keep both mother and child alive. When we disconnected them, they bled. The one who survived was put to bed to rest. The one who did not went underway, where we could forget. Most did not make it to bed at all. Most went underway.

“Fewer mouths means fewer rats,” the mayor said, to gild our loss with a sliver of hope. 

“If you don’t look at them, they’ll go as suddenly as they arrived,” he added. “A shame they infested the well, of course.”

We all believed him, except for Inez. We had no reason to doubt his veracity. Why else had we locked so many things underway? To forget, so we would not be bothered anymore. We could move forward only if we never looked back. 

Instead of drinking from the well or river, we gathered saliva on our tongues until we had a whole mouthful, and swallowed when we were parched. It should have worked to cull the pests, but even though we closed our eyes and kept them shut, in the night we felt their hairless tails slide across our foreheads, their toes wiggling on our skin. In the morning, we were empty and desperate for slake. 

But Inez, viciously round, went straight into the river and drank mouthful after mouthful. We begged her not to; couldn’t she see she was exacerbating the problem? Did she not care about her child, the last one left intact?

“It’s simple,” Inez said. “It’s not the water.”

“You know where they are coming from,” she reminded us. 

We told her we forgot about the underway. What was there, in the place where the rats swarmed? 

“Everything,” she told us. The utterance was soft, yet we pained to hear. It spurred something deep within us. We hated the feeling. We could not help but want to know more.

The mayor went as far as commanding Inez to stop opening her mouth and, when she refused, he told us to bury her, like we buried everything else. It was the only way to stop the rats. 

“But the baby,” we protested. “It may still be born.”

There had not been a successful birth in too many months. We worried what was left of us would be the last. The responsibility was enormous; to be the culmination. 

“You would have a child born into infestation? Is that what I hear?”

We were not so cruel. That evening, we marched rounded Inez past the river, down into the dark hole of the underways. We kept our eyes shut as we did, lifting shovels loaded with dirt over our head. Inez said nothing we could hear, for we stuffed cotton in our ears, just as the mayor told us to. Only little Hazel, who hadn’t bled yet, peeked through the fingers of her father’s hands. 

Later, she told us how Inez smiled as we covered her. 

She said it was not a nice smile. 

We told little Hazel to forget, and sang her songs about chocolate creams, blue stars, and sunflowers that had never known the disturbance of an insect on its petals. 

Within a week the rats stopped. We returned to the well. We returned to the river. We promised to never think about Inez, for when we did, our skin became damp with worry. After so long without water, we could not afford to waste a single drop. Not if we were to continue on as we always had.

Then, one last evening, we felt the rumble in the earth and heard the wail all around us. At first, we searched out Simeon to beat him raw, but he was found sleeping under his covers, and we could not in good conscience bear our fists to his face. We followed the noise long past the river, far from the orchards, until we were in front of the underway, but it was no longer buried. 

Inez was there, round as she had ever been, sitting atop everything we made sure to forget, with a slimy child sucking at her breast and the cord still attached. There was no dirt, as though it had never been used to conceal. The rats, thick and long, lifted objects with their teeth and brought them one by one to Inez. Each one she held up to show the child, though its eyes were not open, not so soon.

She lovingly spoke of every object: the ceramic bowl Amalia used to serve her mother a final helping of medicine, which didn’t work; the darkened wood of the burnt church; this, a piece of dead aunt Gertrude who died on holiday and so was inconvenient to mourn. She described the rings which contained our broken engagements. She read out titles of books whose knowledge we regretted knowing. She tasted a slice of cake from a birthday we did not celebrate. On her feet, she tried on shoes the mayor once wore, when he was a boy who dreamt only of the sound of the sea.

We saw, we remembered, we fell to our knees.

Inez saw us back. She laughed, terrible and loud. It sent the rats scurrying, our past dangling in every maw. They dragged our objects up and out, and the ground shook with their movement. We forgot how deep the underway went; all the way to our home and beyond. Simeon was the first to disappear. He was on his knees, patting his thighs, when the ground collapsed underneath him. Then it took Betty and her son Johannas. The mayor turned and tried to outrun it, but no man runs faster than collapse. They sunk into the earth in a black hole so dark we could no longer see them. One by one, it took us all.

It is dark here, underways. We cannot see each other. We reach out to grasp hands and find only air. The only noise that penetrates is the echo of a giggle, the only thing we feel is the light footed dance of a mother on top.

Will you remember us, Inez?

What will you tell your child of where you used to be, Inez?

Inez—tell us, please—will you think of us at all?