By Ella Wong

WARNING: This story is unrealistic and several details have been exaggerated.

When Nanra opened her eyes for the first time, she couldn’t see anything; a cloud of churning white mist roiled in her vision, blotting everything else from view.

Gradually the mist lifted, and she saw that she was in a glass box. The floor of the box was strewn with hay and there was a cold dish of water that slipped down her throat like ice.

That was when she had only just entered the world, when her fur had been snow-white and soft as silk, when she’d scampered around energetically and not known anything about the cruelty that awaited her.

Now she was a good three weeks old. Her skin was matted, messy and yellowish; her every step hurt and she dragged her feet. Most of the time she just plopped, limp and exhausted, on the floor of her glass box.

All around her other rats did the same, lying weak and trembling in their glass boxes, tired out by whatever dreadful ordeal the humans had put them through.

It was on a Sunday morning that Nanra blinked open her drooping eyelids and saw the familiar flash of yellow that was a Human Glove.

Wearily she scampered onto the Glove, wincing. The Glove retrieved a long, silver needle that gleamed in the light.

A sharp stab of pain jarred Nanra’s side.

As she felt her muscles lock into place, seized up, paralysed by whatever the needle had injected into her blood, Nanra watched the Human scribble onto a piece of paper.

She knew what it would say: her name, NaN-RA, as the Humans called her, the name of what had paralysed her, and how she had reacted.

When she could finally move again, she collapsed onto the bumpy, cold yellow surface of the Glove. It threw her unceremoniously back into her glass box.

She lifted her head, saw the Glove walk away, and noticed she had a new neighbour.

“Hello,” she said to the excited white rat running around in the glass box next to her. “I think you’d better get out of here.”

“What? Why?” the rat asked, bouncing up and down with excitement.

Nanra sighed. “Because, if you don’t, sooner or later you’ll end up like me, and then like the poor rat who used to live in that box.”

“What happened to her?”

“The Humans experimented on her too much, and like every other rat that inhabited these boxes before us, they took her away.”

“Where to?”

Nanra couldn’t believe this rat. “To be burned,” she said.

“Why?” the rat exclaimed, panicked now.

Nanra turned her back to the newcomer, sighing. “Just get out of here while you still can.”

“But I don’t know how!” the rat wailed.

“Easy.” Nanra yawned. “When the Humans come to do their first test on you, run away. Then you can escape through the vents.” She nodded at the metal plates that dotted the ceiling, the plates with slits big enough to fit something small—small like lab rats.

The next thing she knew she was fast asleep. She didn’t know what would happen to the new rat, but she hoped she made it out. She knew the Humans would take her away soon. Her time was nearly up. Better use it to help a young one than throw it away.

“I can’t believe we were outsmarted by a rat!” one of the Humans thundered, glaring fiercely at the space where the new rat used to be. “I can’t believe we let it escape!”

Nanra grinned. The newcomer had escaped then, out into a world of sunshine and grass, a world Nanra had never known. Good for her, she thought. She could only dream of the outside. She knew it only through the stories rats captured from the wild told her. Rats from the wild always lived longer than rats from the lab. They were just made tougher.

She closed her eyes, and the world went black.

Nanra couldn’t believe her luck. When she’d opened her eyes it was still dark and she’d panicked a little. But then light had poured in from the ceiling; not white LED light but real, molten sunshine, warm and golden.

She’d tumbled out from a little pot onto a cluster of branches, realising the Humans had taken her to be burned. Just as the branches leapt into the air, ablaze with flame and smouldering with glowing embers, she scampered away and escaped into grass and sunshine.

She felt the wind blow her fur until it was silky-smooth again, inhaled the sweet scent of dew and crisp, clean air that wasn’t encased indoors.

She knew the world was hers now; the world that the Humans had kept out, the world she’d always believed to be non-existent even though she knew it was real.

The world she should have been born into.

Nanra was no longer a lab rat. She was a free rat from the wild, and she wasn’t going to be captured by the Humans ever again. 

As she scampered away she vowed to return and free all the other rats inside the lab.

Two weeks later, the rats vanished. According to a newspaper article, the scientists were “stumped”. A little boy saw a line of rats running through a dark alleyway.

Who knows what became of that line?