“The South Waterfront ceremony began with the Mayor’s speech. “Our city, our glorious city, the City of Roses is under siege.” Mayor Williams looked at the audience and smiled. “But today we begin to fight back.” One of his staff handed him a large replica of a mouse trap. “Let the rodents beware, their days are numbered. No more will they infest the retail shops, threaten the cheese mongers or infect our citizenry with their ill-gotten diseases.” The crowd politely clapped. “And we’ve got the king rat already!” Mayor Williams motioned toward the coffin. The band began to play a jazzed-up version of a funeral march as the coffin was pulled off the flatbed truck. The Mayor and the Mayoral staff stood back as workers set the coffin onstage. The Mayor’s chief of staff, a large fellow with a badly placed hairpiece, opened the lid. As he did so he noticed several large cylindrical objects at the bottom of the box.

When the explosion took place, the rats watched from the skybridge connecting the University and VA hospitals. As they watched they snacked on roasted persimmons drizzled with a mushroom kale coulis.  Though rats aren’t overly emotive, the ONEL rats were positively effusive, waving their tails in unison and rubbing their whiskers together as the dust cloud rose from the South Waterfront. ”

Our third installment of Summer Short Reads is “Vector Control,” a story by Micah Thorp, originally published at The Fictional Café. Read the story HERE.

Micah Thorp is a physician and writer in Portland, Oregon. His first novel, Uncle Joe’s Muse, won a 2022 Next Generation Indie Book Award and a Foreword Indies Book of the Year Award. A sequel, Uncle Joe’s Senpai, was published in 2023. His writing has been published in Cleaver Magazine, Fictional Cafe and Blind Corner.  Aegolius Creek, winner of a 2025 IPPY award, will be published in September by Type Eighteen Books. Preorder HERE.