1
XANTHIN BOX
 
 
Bryce smelled a rat.
He sighed. He knew what it meant. He would have to clean up the garage. At least until he found the dead rat.
So he started in. He was eighty years old, and increasingly absentminded, so if he encountered something that needed doing, he generally did it immediately, lest he forget. The stench of the rat would not ease on its own if ignored. The body would be there somewhere, buried under or behind assorted junk. If he could get at it.
It had been some time since he had shaped up the garage. In fact he had mostly stopped coming in here, since he gave up driving, and things had pretty much accumulated on their own. But in time it would need to be cleared out, when the house was put on the market, because—
Because Bryce had between one and two years left to live. His doctor had given him the word: he had type two diabetes because he had grown too fat, and his blood vessels were three-quarters clogged because he had eaten too many fatty snacks, and the formerly inert prostate cancer was beginning to become assertive because, well, just because. He had to exercise, reduce his weight, and stop sleeping so much in front of the TV. He needed to get out and interact with other people, becoming more social. He needed to challenge his brain instead of being a mental sponge. Or else.
Bryce had lacked the gumption to do any of those things. Exercise was too much work, and his fading eyesight made it harder to recognize people. So he was faced with the or else. That meant he would die, and his house would be sold in the process of putting his estate in order. It wasn’t much of an estate; forty-odd years of office work had not paid any fortune. The two of them had been comfortable, however, not requiring much.
Then Bev had died, and any remaining ambition Bryce might have had had dissipated like windblown smoke. He existed; that was most of what was to be said for him. Their sons had expressed concern, but they had lives and families of their own, as did their grown children, his grandchildren, so they mostly left Bryce alone. His increasing grouchiness of age might have had something to do with it.
He got to work, slowly, because he did not have a lot of energy to spare. He might have to do the job in installments, until he penetrated to the rat’s nest, wherever it was. Too bad odor was not more specific, so that he could orient on it efficiently and be done with the distasteful chore. As it was, he would soon be grimy, because layers of dust covered everything. Roaches and silverfish skittered away, resenting the disturbance. Bryce grimaced; he should have donned gloves for this dirty work, but naturally hadn’t thought of it. It was just too complicated to go back to fetch them from the house, assuming he could find them.
Almost immediately he had to fight off a wave of nostalgia. There were things here dating back decades, to when the family was more active and ambitious. Useless things that he had not been able to throw out, because that wo