We’ll be throwing an old man into the street.

As the officers emerged on the front porch, flanking a confused old man in slippers, Jimmy Lense snapped their portrait. It appeared on the front page, over the caption: “Elderly man evicted from home by heartless town officials.”

MYRTLE AVENUE BY ROBERT BOUCHERON 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 19

From the tiny square window in the pantry where she was rotating canned goods so all the labels faced out, Blair Wolfram saw a rat emerge from the foundation next door. It paused in the sunlight, then scurried through the weedy yard.

“It’s not the first time,” she told her husband Eric. They were eating dinner in the cramped but beautifully decorated dining room with the cut-glass chandelier.

“How can you be sure it was a rat?”

“It was too small for a woodchuck. It didn’t hop like a squirrel. It was dark and shifty.”

“If the weeds are so high, how could you see where it ran?”

“It left a wake, like a speedboat.”

“At least it didn’t run this way.”

“Eric! Sooner or later, it will gnaw its way into our hous…