Listen, I’m tellin’ ya, don’t get married, y’all. Any of you here tonight married? He’s over there looking like he’s kind of not sure. His wife’s like, “Sweetie, raise your hand!” He’s like, “Who, me?”

Don’t get married. I met my wife, oh, a millennium ago, when we were in our early twenties, and I thought she was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen in my life, swear to God. Never, never had I seen a more beautiful woman. She was funny and kind, and we were living together within a few months. But my wife, here’s the thing you got to know about my wife: She is a bag of rats.

Some of you are laughing, you’re like, “Haha, this guy is SAVAGE,” and I want you to know that this is not a joke. My wife is a literal bag of rats. There are approximately 300 rats inside of the bag she wears as her skin and they are all constantly clawing to get out. I don’t know how she got this way.

I’ve wanted to ask her about it, but you know how women are! I’m like, “Hey, honey, can I ask you something?” And she’s like, “Are you mad at me?” And I’m like, “No, I just have a question.” And she’s like, “It feels like you’re mad at me.”

So, I haven’t figured it out! Sometimes you gotta know the smart questions to ask and which things to leave untouched—am I right, fellas?

Anyway, here’s how I figured it out. I took her out to a movie, real smooth operator, first date. We went to see one of those Minions movies, the good one, the one that’s laugh-out-loud funny. And after, she invites me up to her place, real suggestive like, “Do I want a drink?” We all know what she meant by that, right? You in the striped tee, you look like you know what she meant by that!

So, we start kissing, and let’s just say there’s a lot of tongue straight out the gate. And as I’m, you know, gettin’ into it, I feel this puncture right on my tongue. I jump back and my wife, she’s like, “Albert, stop it!” And I’m like, “Hey, baby, my name’s not Albert!” And she’s like, “I know, Albert’s the rat who just bit you.”

So, that’s when she told me about her situation. You good people probably are thinkin’, “I would never stay with a woman who was 300 rats in a bag of human flesh.” And I gotta tell ya, as another man once said, the heart wants what it wants. The fact is, until you have made sweet, sweet love to a woman who is a body bag full of rats, you truly don’t know what you’ll be into. And I say that as an expert. I did not know. And I was.

And did I mention that she was smokin’ hot? Not only did she have this long red hair down to her waist and an ass to die for, but her body was also always doing this twitchy thing because of the rats, which, honestly, huge turn-on for me.

So, one day she asks me if we can go out to eat. Okay, guys and girls, you got to understand that she had literally just eaten my whole leftover calzone. And it was not a little calzone, you feel me? So, I said to her, “Hey, why you gotta eat right now? You just ate an enormous calzone.” And she was like, “It’s not for me, it’s for the rats.” And I was just like, you know what, I’m a gentleman.

I took her to my favorite seafood place, a little place called, “What’s the Catch?” The catch is you almost always end up with food poisoning, but the lobster rolls are so good there it’s worth every ounce of diarrhea. So, we’re sitting there, and she’s choosing which foods she thinks the rats would like. One of the rats, Evelyn, has just gone vegan and she’s been making a huge stink about it; another one, Arnold, is gluten free. It’s hell trying to accommodate all the rats’ dietary preferences. You think rats eat just anything? I laugh at your ignorance.

So finally, she decides on, I don’t know, coleslaw or something, and she opens her mouth wider than I’ve ever seen a woman open her mouth, and she squats down and kind of lowers the coleslaw in. The noises that woman makes! And I’m not talking about in the bedroom, okay, get your mind out of the gutter, I mean the noises that woman makes when the 300 rats inside of her skin are munching down on some probably expired coleslaw. It’s fucking sick, man.

I like my ladies nasty.

And all of the sudden, the rats spit the coleslaw out. I mean, like they were five-year-old children. They hack out the coleslaw and I can hear Evelyn squeak, “Coleslaw isn’t vegan!” And my future wife, she falls down on the floor of the restaurant just squirming there as the rats try to mutiny.

Now, I’ve dated women who are dramatic before, but this really takes the cake, you know? I mean, I dated a girl once who used to get mad at me every time someone died on Grey’s Anatomy. But this, I mean, god. She’s writhing around on the floor and she’s like, “The rats, they’re eating my insides!” And I’m like, okay, let me do some quick calculations. Fellas, you ever do some quick calculations? I’m talking like, okay, how much of the crazy do I need to put up with to get laid tonight? You know the calculations I mean.

So, I decide, okay, I really like this girl, and I bend down next to her at the restaurant, and I hold her hand. And I look into her eyes and I say, “I’m right here, baby, I’m not going no place.”

And that’s when the magic happens. She gets this little tear right in the corner of her eye and she says to me, “Since I was a little girl, my mom told me no one would ever love a woman who was only a bag of rats. But with you, I wonder if it’s possible.”

Okay, listen, I don’t have a heart of stone. I could see how much it meant to her and I guess, if I’m being honest, I started to wonder if I was a bag of rats too, like, on a metaphorical level. If maybe everyone in their own way is a bag of rats, only this woman, my future wife, she just happened to also be a literal bag of rats in addition to being a bag of rats on a spiritual level.

So, I got down on one knee, and I proposed to her then and there. I told her I wanted her, all of her, and Albert and Evelyn and Arnold plus all the other rats inside of her, and she looked at me and said, “Let me think about it.” And she thought about it for a few days and then she was like, “I think so, yes.”

And I was so happy. I mean, truly. We bought the rats little wedding outfits, which nobody could see but I think it made the rats feel like they were part of the festivities in a meaningful way. Her mom showed up at the wedding and she said, “I don’t get it, but I’m happy you’re both happy.” And the rats danced the electric slide in her belly at the reception.

But here’s the thing about women, and I hope you all are listening: No matter how much you want to be Prince Charming, and rescue the damsel from the tower, you can never save a woman from the rats within her.

It started a few months after the wedding. I wake up one morning at 3 a.m. to the sounds of the rats clawing at her insides. My wife is weeping, and I ask her, “What’s going on?” And she looks at me and says, “I don’t know.” And I say to her, “Is it the rats?” And she says, “Yeah.” So, I hold her and she says, “Please don’t.” And I’m like, “What do you mean?” And she’s like, “I just want to be alone right now.”

Ladies and gents, I have lived a long life and there are certain things I will never understand: I don’t understand why IHOP is short for International House of Pancakes when it is clearly only located in the U.S. I don’t understand why nobody likes the Martin Short movie Clifford where he plays a ten-year-old boy when it is the funniest movie ever made. But the one thing I do not understand more than anything in the world is why the person who is in the direst need of love is always the person who seems to push it away the hardest.

So, for months, I wake up, middle of the night, to the sounds of the rats clawing at my wife’s insides and every night I say, “Baby, what’s wrong?” “Baby, how can I help?” “Baby, what do you need?” And every day she says to me, “It’s nothing.”

Now, you ladies in the audience are looking at me like you would never behave this way. But I know, speaking from personal experience, that this is what you all are like. Don’t try to pretend you’re above it. All the fellas are nodding their heads, they’re saying, “She does this too. My girlfriend, she does it too.”

Which is why I’m saying to you, don’t get married. Get a dog. Collect stamps. The other day, I come home from work, and my wife is sitting there on the couch, and she’s got her computer out, and I figure she’s, you know, ordering some overpriced shoes on the internet like she’s usually doing. But it turns out she’s got the browser up and she’s googled, “Amount of poison kill 300 rats.”

And I guess I sort of felt like, exhausted. Like, I knew I should tell her not to, I just couldn’t do the whole routine anymore. Maybe you’ve never felt this way, maybe you’re a better person than me and congratulations, but I knew if I asked her about it she’d say it was nothing and honestly I thought, “Well, good.” I figured maybe, I don’t know, it would work. Maybe I knew it wouldn’t work. Maybe I’m just an asshole. But I knew it wasn’t on me. I knew I had tried and tried, and she wasn’t willing, and I couldn’t do anything about it, so I just went into our room and I didn’t say a goddamn thing.

I know, I know, it’s a comedy show! Lighten the mood, mister! Listen, y’all are my family and you won’t mind if I get a little real with you, will you? I went to my room and an hour or so later I hear a hurling noise followed by a squeaking noise. And I open the door, and my wife is vomiting up the rats and they’re flying out of her mouth screaming. Rats upon rats squirming through the air out of her mouth coming straight towards me, squeaking like they’ve been possessed by the devil. And I was like that is the thing about women, one second they’re sitting calmly on the couch, the next second hundreds of rats are flying out of their mouth screaming, and if you call them dramatic, they’ll yell at you.

She vomits out every single one of those goddamn rats and I’m dodging them like I’m playing dodgeball or something. Just like, moving my body like oop, oop, trying not to get in the way of any of the rats.

The rats are on the ground and all the sudden they start multiplying. The whole apartment is overrun with rats, crawling on each other, squeaking, getting their little tails in each other’s faces. I look at her and she looks at me and we know there is only one way to get rid of them. She reaches down, picks up one of the rats, and so do I. And looking each other in the eye, we swallow all the rats whole.

Anna-Claire McGrath (she/her) is a writer based in Virginia. She attended the Clarion Workshop in 2022 and was a 2022 Key West Literary Seminar fellow. She has an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University. Her work can be found in Moss Puppy, Spank the Carp and upcoming in The Blood Orange Review.