I saw you as I rushed from an elementary school in the Lakeview neighborhood of Chicago, where I sometimes worked as a recess and lunch monitor. The children there, especially the 7th graders, looked forward to their small 30 minutes outside, so they didn’t care about the light mix of rain and snow that fell. It had left both me and you soaking wet. 

I almost stepped on you, mistaken you for a large leaf on the ground that had turned dark and wet. As my shoe was about to step on your small head, I noticed your long, white-ish tail and moved my foot slightly to the left. This all happened within a small second as my approaching bus was, and still is, more important than you.

You were a large rat, clearly an adult, that was so wet that you appeared like a ball of hair. You were not there the day before so I could only think you passed away very recently. From what? I can not say. It was impossible to tell if there was a wound hidden beneath the wetness of your fur with the small glance I got.

It makes me sick to think about what would’ve happened if I hadn’t paid attention to the ground and instead looked at the dark sky. Would you have squished beneath my white sneakers, staining them red? Would you have made a noise like a bursting balloon? Had your insides already been wiped out by the sole of someone else's shoe, leaving my own shoe to have been covered with nothing but your fur and diseases?

I’m lucky to not have to worry about such things. But you lie so close to an elementary school and a bus stop. What if some poor child steps on you instead? During recess, though it was raining and snowing, many of the middle schoolers were outside wearing crocs. If they squish your freshly deceased body underneath their crocs, your inners will splash across their white Nike socks and soak through to their toes. And your disease ridden blood will be on their skin, staying there until they make it home and clean it off. But no, these kids didn’t even use hand sanitizer at the height of the pandemic. Your blood will be wiped off with a paper towel that has nothing but water on it, and when the child wipes the blood off their feet, it will get on their hands, and then their parents will call them for dinner and they’ll eat without touching the soap in the bathroom. Your disease will enter their body.

Nobody would want that to happen to a child and I don’t want to think about how I would personally know a child that this happened to. That day may be the last day I go to that elementary school, so I can not confirm how you were cleaned up. I can only hope that one of the few dog walkers noticed you and gotten you cleaned up before someone stepped on your fresh corpse.