Edward and John by Mark Antony Raines and Winston Marks

Edward Neff came onto his dusty old flat ,slammed the front door with a thud then calmly without breaking a sweat dropped a thin bundle of currency into the £ 100 bill drawer of the flat packed flat-top desk he pick up from a local charity store and then kicked the drawer shut with a dusty boot.

Due to him being a o.c.c he flicked the drip from his hooked nose which some said was like the Roman s of golden days which was chronically irritated by the wheat dust of the warehouse, then he wiped his fingers down the leg of his soiled denims as he had nobody to criticise this bad habit. Across the windowless room which made the air stake as a day old bread ,John stirred awake from the noise and began nosing in the debris of his filthy cage.

“Time for supper, John?” He tugged at the twine at his belt and examined his £3 watch He got that off a fly market as He just wanted a no thrills watch that just told the time and bought else.

He pinched a dozen grains of wheat from a two-pound coffee can and let them sift through the wires of the cage. John pounced on the grain hungrily.

“Wait a minute! What do you say, dammit?” His hand reached for the marshmallow-toasting fork that hung from a hook on the wall for just got these occasions

. He touched the points, filed needle sharp. “What do you say?” he repeated, twanging the tines like a tuning fork-Ping Ping.

John skittered to the far corner, tearing new holes in the old newspaper with frantic claws. Cowering against the wires he spat half-chewed flecks of wheat trying to say the magic words that would spare him from the fork. “Tinkoo! Tinkoo!” he squeaked, straining to make the two syllables distinct.

Edward then hung up the fork back on its hook and watched John turned to lick at the old scabs clotted from earlier jabs as most animals do this to keep a sounds clean and free from possible infection.

John then made sullen inventory to be sure there were no new crimson leaks in his louse-infested hide.

Until two months ago, he had been just one more gregarious specimen of Mammalia Rodentia Simplicidentata Myomorphia Muridae decumanus.

Now he had another name. Like each of his predecessors in the cage, he was a large, brown rat called John—after Edward despised and deceased father as a way of getting back at his father’s misdeeds. Edward named all his rats John.