Free And The Rat Laughed by Nava Semel

real parents, even though that was one of the questions that I’d written on the first page of my notebook, and I’d even marked it as the most important one.
    I hid the notebook from her.
    I thought to myself that at that age she must have forgotten really quickly, which was lucky for her, because if anyone stuck me at my age in some godforsaken place I’d never forget it, but maybe that’s because my memory works differently and I never forget anything, which is something I have inherited from my dead grandfather.
    I consoled myself: it’s a pretty good story, even though it’s kind of short, without anything horrible, with good characters and with my grandmother who saw the nicer side of life, and it’s just my lousy luck that I can’t write the story and get a hundred, because that’s the grade I would have gotten if I’d been able to produce a story like that after we kept hearing only awful things.
    And it was only much later that I noticed that I was the only one who was using the words Mother and Father ...
    I was about to get up, and then she said: Come, let me tell you a legend.
    Why a legend? I asked. I’m not a child, and I’m not some kind of retard who needs to have everything painted rosy, with lots of soft edges that have nothing to do with how things really were.
    I’m too old for legends, Grandma, I told her. Besides, our generation doesn’t go for legends. Except maybe for babies who believe in happy endings, and take it in along with “and they lived happily ever after”, which is the biggest lie in the world. So why was she treating me that way?
    And then she said that some legends are horrible, and I said: Yes, like Hansel and Gretel with the witch who’s about to eat them up, or the ugly dwarf with the long name who wants to kidnap the miller’s daughter but then she pulls a trick on him. As long as we’re into legends, it should only be the kind that involves retribution and a chance to even the score, because if I’d been Hansel and Gretel, I’d never have forgiven the witch, and I would have run after her and caught her and shoved her in the oven and stood there watching the smoke and even burned down the gingerbread house till there was no trace of memory left of it. And as for the miller’s daughter, she wasn’t that little, so she didn’t forget anything, and she taught her kid – who stayed with her for good – never to believe what people told him, and to watch out for monsters in disguise, and how lucky we are that there weren’t any dwarfs left in the world, because there were more than enough mean people already, so there’s no point in inventing all sorts of nasty creatures besides.
    Why didn’t my grandma tell the farmers that the rat was bothering her? Or else, maybe they did try to trap it and it kept coming back, because rats are such disgusting parasites, and a little girl makes the easiest prey. I felt really sorry for her. Of all the animals in the world – a creature like a rat! It must have been hell. How gross. What a filthy animal. Makes you want to throw up. I remember when the caretaker at school found a rat climbing on the drainpipe one day last spring, and got the principal and all the teachers to come. We stopped class and the principal kept screaming. You couldn’t tell if she was screaming because she was angry or because she was scared. The rat must have come from the sewer. Anyway, they sent us home early that day. It was before you came to teach at our school. So they called in the sanitation workers from the municipality with masks and toxic stuff, and they disinfected all the cesspools around the school and on the whole block. All because of one rat that they saw on the drainpipe for half an hour.
    Daniel who sits behind me said that maybe the rat was more afraid of us, but that’s because Daniel always turns things around, just to feel superior.
    And my grandma had to put up with that rat much longer than a single day. It wasn’t a pit,