At pet stores in Detroit, you can buy frozen rats for seventy-five cents apiece, to feed your pet boa constrictor" back home in Grosse Pointe, or in Grosse Pointe Park, while the free nation of rats in Detroit emerges from alleys behind pet shops, from cellars and junked cars, and gathers to flow at twilight like a river the color of pavement, and crawls over bedrooms and groceries and through broken school windows to eat the crayon from drawings of rats— and no one in Detroit understands how rats are delicious in Dearborn. If only we could communicate, if only the boa constrictors of Southfield would slither down I-94, turn north on the Lodge Expressway, and head for 8th Street, to eat out for a change. Instead, tomorrow, a man from Birmingham enters a pet shop in Detroit to buy a frozen German shepherd for six dollars and fifty cents to feed his pet cheetah, guarding the compound at home. Oh, they arrive all day, in their locked cars, buying schoolyards, bridges, buses, churches, and Ethnic Festivals; they buy a frozen Texaco station for eighty-four dollars and fifty cents to feed to an imported London taxi in Huntington Woods; they buy Tiger Stadium, frozen, to feed to the Little League in Grosse Ile. They bring everything home, frozen solid as pig iron, to the six-car garages of Harper Woods, Grosse Pointe Woods, Farmington, Grosse Pointe Farms, Troy, and Grosse Arbor— and they ingest everything, and fall asleep, and lie coiled in the sun, while the city thaws in the stomach and slides to the small intestine, where enzymes break down molecules of protein to amino acids, which enter the cold bloodstream....
Posted on: Sun, 08 Sep 2013 12:46:12 +0000
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