RatMouth

I glanced across the bar. Ratmouth was in his usual place, always slightly out of phase—not displaced so much as misaligned on purpose, like a man wearing the wrong second. His grin lagged half a beat behind his eyes. An affectation, sure, but a practiced one, like Mansfield reading Shakespeare to Tchaikovsky, shaken not burned, the words sweating through the music. The jukebox coughed up a hymn in the wrong key. Glasses sweated. Time bent at the elbows. Ratmouth raised his drink before I decided to notice him, already ahead of me, already rewriting the scene.

Ratmouth hid his hideaway sideways like a hi-hat that hit different dimensions—

metal whispering to metal, a rhythm you felt in the jaw before the ear caught up.

He lived between beats, kept his stash in the off-time, where the bartender’s blink

and the mirror’s lie overlapped. You couldn’t point to it. You could only circle it.

Ratmouth tapped once, twice—no sound—then the room slid a notch to the left and there it was,

a pocket in the air, folded wrong, smiling like it knew your name but wouldn’t say it.

Ratmouth knew the scene but I knew the dream—

that was the split, the clean fracture running through the room.

He could name the players, quote the exits, recite the angles of light like stage directions.

I’d been somewhere else, watching the same night happen with its shoes off,

no script, no applause, just the hum underneath.

What we were missing was the in-between.

The smear.

The transit lounge where scenes dissolve into dreams and dreams forget their alibis.

That narrow band where meaning leaks but hasn’t curdled yet.

We were standing on opposite shores, waving signals through static,

both right, both early, both refusing to step into the gap

where the real work was already happening.

I closed clasped my hands like a briefcase you bring just in case—
empty but heavy with intent—and made my way toward Ratmouth,
all substance and no style, the kind of posture that doesn’t announce itself
but still gets frisked.

Each step shed a version of me.
The floor stuck, then didn’t.
Ratmouth watched without looking, already filing me under inevitable.
My knuckles held the shape of something I wasn’t ready to open.
No flourish, no angle—just weight moving through smoke,
a delivery without a label, arriving early to a conversation
that had been waiting for me longer than I knew.

I spoke to Ratmouth.
He replied.

What was said didn’t survive the exchange.

Something like you’re late crossed the space between us, but it arrived as steam.
I said I know or maybe do you, the words already folding as they left my mouth.
Ratmouth answered with a sentence that began in my voice and ended in his,
a phrase under pressure, consonants buckling, verbs leaking out the sides.

Meaning collapsed the way a cheap table does when too many elbows lean in.
What remained was tone.
Temperature.
A shared understanding that the question had already been answered
somewhere else, earlier, by someone neither of us remembered being.

We nodded at the wreckage.
That was the agreement.

Godot was waiting on us so I said to Ratmouth *I trust you will discuss*—

not a request, not a command, more like a receipt you sign without reading.

The words hung there, provisional, already aging.

Ratmouth smiled like a file marked **pending**.

He said nothing that stayed put.

Discussion leaked sideways, syllables trading coats, verbs loitering where nouns used to work.

Godot tapped his foot in another room, in another year, in a margin someone forgot to print.

Trust became procedural.

Waiting became active.

We stood in the delay like men paid by the hour,

knowing full well the meeting would occur

only after we stopped believing it mattered.

Outside, silence hung like a jury out to dry—

twelve blank faces pegged to the line, verdicts dripping slow.

No wind. No appeal.

Even the streetlights held their breath, bulbs humming mistrials.

You could hear the city thinking about speaking,

then deciding against it,

the way guilt does when it knows it won’t be asked twice.

This wasn’t proof of systems overlapping—

that would imply diagrams, permission, a clean Venn.

This was proof of occurrence.

Something happened. That was the only credential.

No theory survived contact.

No framework stepped forward to claim it.

It didn’t *mean* anything in the way meaning likes to mean.

It simply took place, the way a bruise appears without asking

whether you remember the impact.

Occurrence leaves residue, not explanation.

A smell. A timing error. A phrase you can’t unhear.

Systems can argue later.

This had already happened,

and that was the problem.

I told Ratmouth to catch a personality and I’d see him after the fall.
He nodded like someone already mid-conversion, half a face ahead of himself.
The word after slipped its leash.

I hailed a cab. It arrived before I raised my hand.
The driver didn’t ask where—already knew the shape of home.
Streetlights passed like edits that didn’t take.
Behind me, the night kept talking to itself.

Some endings had already expired.
Not concluded—voided.
Used up in advance, like stamps for letters never sent.
What remained was transit,
the long dissolve where nothing resolves

.-Lou Toad, 2026.