I walked past a hoodrat trail today, a beaten path across a marginal, unused space, close to two occupied mansions, and one unoccupied vacant farm house with shed and barn, that somehow got swallowed by this cancerous city. Unknown to the police and to most of the area residents, this is a place where youth criminals gather to organize, to parlay, to head out on raiding parties, to initiate set members.

In the past five years I have found many things here: a revolver cylinder for a .38 caliber hand gun, a broken pocket knife, hair, blood, and all of the assorted markings of our high culture—crack vials, liquor bottles, needles. It is my policy never to touch anything in this quarter acre, but to view it from various angles and try and reconstruct the nocturnal goings on here, which I do try to avoid witnessing.

Today, at 3:43 on this Thursday afternoon, as a cold storm front rolled in overhead, I found something new under the sun, which does not occur often for me in this line of inquiry.

At my feet, on the curb, precisely the size of my 8.5 sneaker, was the body of a Norway rat, with a rubbery 11-inch tail, as thick as my smallest finger at the base. The rat was killed last night, by some means which did not involve bloodshed but did deform the skull. This rat was posed, to lay on its back like a slain human, a post-mortem posturing artifice that had turned half way into the normal rodent fetal position.

On this large, boss rat’s chest, was—still is, I think, as it has been less than two hours—a 4G smart phone, the screen having been cracked in a starburst pattern by what I presume was the glass-breaking spike on a tactical folding knife, of the kind on sale for $5 down the street at the Pakistani convenience store. This smart phone covered the mid-portion of the rat’s body, making him something of the picture-frame to this gruesome work of art, which I do understood, could have accidentally occurred due to a convergence of plausible factors that have nothing to do with hoodrats sending some kind of anti-snitching method. However, the use of dead rats to warn associates against cooperating with the authorities is so pervasive in Baltimore, that cops do it to each other.

I do not believe it is a stretch to surmise that a local youth thug will be sweating pretty profusely on this wintery night.