Some people think all a rat could ever be is a janitor, but, as Rick discovers, he could be something else, too – an inspired artist.

Today’s story was recorded in front of a live audience at Furlandia 2026.

Today’s Story is the second and final part of “Visage of a Vermin Vandal” by Malcolm F. Cross, who has been writing stories in the same setting as this story for more than a decade, including two novels – Dog Country, and Mouse Cage. You can catch up with them at their website, SinIsBeautiful.com, or on Bluesky.

Last time, Rick Larue, genetically engineered rat, was denied a promotion because his boss was convinced a rat’s happy place was cleaning bioreactor sewage. Rick was convinced too, up until he encountered a beautiful mural on the side of a Hindu Mandir, depicting the goddess Karni Mata, and the rats she holds sacred...

Read for you by Rob MacWolf — werewolf hitchhiker.

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https://thevoice.dog/episode/visage-of-a-vermin-vandal-by-malcolm-f-cross-read-live-part-2-of-2

“Visage of

a

Vermin

Vandal”

by

Malcolm

F.

Cross (part 1 of 2)

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One copy of this form for each installment. Please ensure that the intro, the summary for the show notes, and the outro, are unique for each installment.

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Synopsis for the narrator, outlining the story and the ending (you can copy/paste this in all the installments of your story):
This is a science fiction/slice of life story set in a potential future world, about a genetically engineered rat-person, Rick, originally built for slavery but freed and placed with a normal family during childhood. Rick is working as a bio-safety sanitation engineer – or, in plainer language, a janitor who works around bioreactors - and has come to see little value in himself or his place in the world. Visage of a Vermin Vandal is about his journey to find value in himself, triggered by discovering a work of mural art that makes him feel like ‘people like rats’. Discovering this artwork at the end of the first part will, ultimately, change his life for the better.

During the second part, difficulties and discrimination at his job, along with inspiration from the artwork, lead him to his own artistic explorations as a graffiti artist around the city of San Iadras, and eventually leads to him quitting his current job and seeking another at a firm run by other genetically engineered furries – able to recognize his personal value, at last, and able to try and find places that others see it, too. (Though he’s still, clearly, an illicit artist.)

Genre or genres (for tagging purposes):
Science fiction, slice of life, character exploration

Content warnings (if any)
Maaaaaybe mild prejudice and workplace difficulty, but not necessarily...

Contact info (optional)
Telegram: ...
Mastodon: …
BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/foozzzball.bsky.social
Email: [email protected]
Other: …

Writing galleries (optional)
SoFurry: …
FurAffinity: …
Other: www.SinisBeautiful.com

Pronunciation guide:
The city of San Iadras – Iadras is relatively straightforward, but, it might be rendred as ‘Yad-Ras’ when said relatively quickly, with a slight rise on the first syllable – Ee-Yad-Ras – if stretched to an unlikely three syllables.
...

Characters & voice characteristics:
Rick Larue: Worldweary, initially downtrodden.
Hartley: Unintentionally patronizing, ignorant of his own privilege.
Dell Simons: Mature, informed, tons of self determination. Sounds older than he is.
Everyone else: Reader’s choice.
...


Introduction for the show notes and promo, to let listeners know what they’re into and get them excited for the story (140 characters or less please, and it should be unique for each installment.)
Rick’s boss thinks he was genetically engineered to clean future-sewage, but Rick’s boss is wrong. Rick could be far more than a janitor.

You’re listening to The Voice of Dog. This is Rob MacWolf, your fellow traveler, and Today’s story is the first of two parts of “Visage of a Vermin Vandal” by Malcolm F. Cross, who has been writing stories in the same setting as this story for more than a decade, including two novels – Dog Country, and Mouse Cage. You can catch up with them at their website, SinIsBeautiful.com, or on Bluesky.

Please enjoy


“Visage of a Vermin Vandal” by Malcolm F. Cross, Part 1 of 2

Hartley stopped dead in the office corridor, staring at Rick’s arm. “Is that shit?”
“Uh, no, sir.” Rick covered the stain with his hand. “It’s iodine. We had to clean up after the gullets were flushed.”
“Iodine gets into the shit, so, that’s shit.” Hartley paused again at his office door, glaring at Rick. “Go get cleaned up.”
“My promotion application review—”
“Isn’t for five minutes. Get properly cleaned up.” Hartley sneered vaguely, before slipping inside.
Properly cleaned up. A statement dripping with human privilege – bare skin could always look clean with enough abrasive scrubbing, but white fur never looked clean. Not without regular bleaching and rebleaching and weekly, if not daily, spa treatments. At least Rick could keep his hands clean – they were partly unfurred, one of the very few advantages rats had.
A trip to the washroom and another round of furious scrubbing with his hydrogen peroxide spritzer didn’t do much to get the yellow-brown iodine smear out of his fur – faded it, some, but this was his third attempt at spot-cleaning after post-shift scrub-out. Maybe it wasn’t just iodine, but it certainly wasn’t gullet-waste. Nothing he could do to hide it, either, his work shirt was short-sleeved.
Hartley, across the desk from Rick, wrinkled his nose as if he could smell something. He couldn’t – Rick was certain of that. The remnants of peroxide that weren’t overpowered by Hartley’s cologne were all Rick could smell, so the only source of bullshit in the office was Hartley’s management style.
“You really need better hygiene practices,” Hartley said.
“Yes, sir,” Rick replied, because bringing in the sample swabs to prove he was sterile might have proved him right and Hartley wrong, but proving Hartley wrong would get him fired.
Hartley flicked Rick’s file onto a sheet of smart-paper sitting on his desktop, picked it up, and leaned back to peruse the document.
The silence grew, and stretched, and Rick broke it by murmuring, “Sorry about the stain. It’s definitely sterile – I swabbed it after scrub-out. Might be a chemical reaction from one of the solvents.”
Hartley’s face was blank. He made eye contact, and slowly composed a smile. “Fairly strong solvents you need to use, cleaning bioreactors.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You know, you’re in the perfect position where you are.” Hartley put down the smart-paper, and Rick knew he wasn’t getting promoted. “Human staff need to have their immunizations boosted, seasonally, to work in biohazard cleanup. There are risks to that. Your production run are naturally immune, aren’t they, Hendrix?”
“Rick is fine,” Rick said, quietly.
“You are immune to biofallout, aren’t you?”
“Yes, sir,” Rick agreed. Most of the mass cloned and gengineered furries were, to one extent or another, but Rick and his hundred and six brothers had their immunity certified.
And Hartley knew that, but didn’t know why it was inappropriate to leap to the conclusion of, “Were they testing your immunity, before the Emancipation? Like, ah, lab rats?”
Rick tried to remain neutral. “No, sir. When we were in high school I and almost thirty of my brothers and our foster-parents jointly paid to have our production run’s immune system tested. For the work-opportunities.” Rick tried to smile.
“Well, it’s certainly helping you. Is this sort of work what you were designed and trained for, pre-Emancipation?”
People who worked with furs – or more accurately, people who cared – usually understood that it was distasteful to try and gather salacious details about pre-Emancipation life. But Hartley didn’t care, and he forced Rick into a reflexive search for an acceptable answer to deflect the question. But Rick’s reflexes weren’t fast enough to avoid remembering, just for a moment, being denied food and sleep until he’d been able to cut metal within tolerances or put down a weld bead correctly.
In effect, being tortured. Until he was eight.
Even Hartley wouldn’t do that to him, if he couldn’t come up with an answer. Rick knew that. But his please-the-boss smile shook as he said, simply, “We learned practical skills. A lot of working with our hands.”
“That makes sense,” Hartley said, glancing back at the smart-paper sheet. “No wonder you excel in this position.”
There wasn’t a way to protest that. Not without losing his job. “Thank you, sir.”
“I’ll be direct.” Hartley put the smart-paper down, and leaned over his desk, as if taking Rick into his confidence. “You haven’t been selected for shift-supervisor. Your metrics are average.”
“That’s why I applied for training – I thought if I could get trained for the role I might be able to…” Rick struggled to find the right words, the corporate propaganda and jargon that might mean a few more New Dollars an hour. “… Contribute to the company’s culture of responsibility, opportunity, and personal excellence.”
“I like that attitude,” Hartley said, patronizingly, with an inexperienced attempt at a fatherly smile. “Unfortunately, if we promoted based on attitude, GaleHome’s sanitary services management team would have a wealth of enthusiasm, and be experts at cleaning their own offices, but lack management skills entirely. I’m sorry, Rick.”
“Yes, sir,” Rick murmured.
“On the bright side, you’re a perfect fit for the role you’re in. After all, you’re a rat, you were made to work with your hands. If you let it, cleaning out bioreactor sewage lines can be your happy place.”

*

A lot of people ignored how hard cleaning was, mentally. Aside from retaining focus during repetitive tasks, they had to safely handle industrial cleaning products powerful enough to burn skin on contact. A good cleaner needed enough chemistry to balance dissolving stains against dissolving whatever had been stained.
An inexperienced or undertrained cleaner, for instance, might try an ammonia based glass cleaner on the bioreactor tubes.
Rick sighed, and kept the hose playing over the glass-looking tube filled with cloudy whorls of liquid. “Well, at least you didn’t mix it in with the bleach.”
It should have come up in the pre-job brief. Sandalio knew that, and hadn’t flagged it, which was why he was angry with himself. Unfortunately, that anger spilled out on Melisa. “Don’t you understand that this equipment has special coatings? The glass cleaner is for the uncoated glass on the observation windows!”
“Si, si, I’m sorry,” Melisa said, head bowed under the weight of her protective hood and Sandalio’s disapproval.
“Ammonia can destroy the coatings on this equipment!”
“I think we got it in time. Probably. I don’t see any damage,” Rick said.
Sandalio glared at him.
Rick didn’t say anything else. Sandalio was the shift-supervisor. He was personable and friendly – when he wasn’t pissed off – and he’d been shift-supervisor for all the years Rick had been working for GaleHome. But Sandalio was forgetful when onboarding new staff – preferring to reassure them that they’d pick it up as they went with a friendly smile.
Most of the time that worked, but most of the time GaleHome didn’t send cleaning staff to Bestgreen Bioagricultural’s core factories in their first week.
A small voice in the back of Rick’s head reminded him that he knew that, and if he knew that, he was already better qualified to be shift-supervisor than Sandalio was.
Rick played the water over the tube, and one of the unnaturally serpentine turds the gullets produced began to twine through it, leaving grimy brown smears along the interior. He turned his head to watch it go, the endless length gradually uncoiling and breaking into sections as it hit the next pipe elbow.
Maybe this, watching the dancing effluvia produced by the gullets digesting agricultural waste into nutrients for cloned tissue extruders, was his happy place. Or could be. If he let it.
Today a gullet had died, and bioengineers getting paid ten times what Rick made would install a new one. Later that day, taking out the old one was his job.
Someone halfway between a veterinarian and a software engineer had to make sure the tumour-like heap of viscera was actually dead and open up the bioreactor cradle, but Rick had to take it out.
In chunks.
Gullets were derived from ultra-efficient gengineered cows, before being spliced and cut down and surgically rebuilt to serve as truck-sized digestive tracts metabolizing sugars and proteins into extracellular fluids for use elsewhere in food production bioreactors. Not unlike the way furries like Rick and Hank had been made out of rats, and Chuck out of wild dogs, and Tilly out of quolls, all of them manufactured as slaves then repurposed as people.
At least Rick didn’t have to cut the gullets into chunks, just take the chunks away after the vet/software engineer had finished with a portable bandsaw.
Ordinarily the food factory would just feed the dead pieces of gullet to the other gullets, but despite the iodine flushes Bestgreen Bioagricultural were still struggling to control contaminant outbreaks in the factory’s bioreactors. That meant Rick had to heft the sloppy chunks up over the rim of the disposal dumpster, which always leaked half-digested faeces, or trailed tangles of viscera, or oozed blood.
Sandalio needed a break to throw up – their masks weren’t quite good enough to keep out the smells. Rick didn’t, even though the company masks didn’t fit as well on him as they did on Sandalio. Rick didn’t like the smells, but he didn’t mind them, either. Maybe because he was a rat, and this was his happy place.
After clearing up after the disposal, getting rid of everything that had leaked, he hosed himself and his personal protective equipment off thoroughly. But the protective equipment didn’t fit right, like the masks it was off the shelf and designed for human beings – not furs like him. So he cleaned himself again in the scrub-out showers. Used a sterility test-swab to make sure he didn’t have anything on him, and slumped onto a bench in the locker room, holding his face tightly, whiskers squeezed to his snout.
Even if it wasn’t his happy place, it was still a place for him to be. It was honest work. When he arrived, things were dirty, unkempt. When he left, he left them pristine.
That was worth holding onto, wasn’t it?

*

No one sat beside him on the tram home, shying away from him like he was filthy, like he stank. Rick wasn’t, and he didn’t. The sweating salaryman on the other side of the tram? Rick had needed to crack open the tram’s nearest window, because that was how obvious it was the salaryman had pulled a double shift since his last shower. But people sat beside the salaryman, and not Rick, because they thought Rick was dirty and either didn’t believe their own noses or simply couldn’t pick up odours as well as Rick could.
The tram rolled silently along the rails lain along the main roads linking Uptown to the 4th Residential District. Self-driving cars neatly slotted in behind and in front of it, and scurried out of the way whenever the tram needed to turn, gradually making its way out to the 7th Residential District, away from the trees and grass of the nearby Upper Greens and into the modern sprawl of four and five storey buildings – just tall and crowded enough to make homes cramped, uncomfortable, and affordable. Especially if shared between a few roommates.
More commuting salary men and women – suited officeworkers in the unwaveringly corporation-committed style of Japan in years gone by – stood clinging to the tram’s handrails and hanging straps, but not one took a seat beside Rick. Not even the lone cheetah among the humans, wearing an unusually shaded blue suit to better contrast the shade of their fur.
They all avoided him, shunned him, so Rick looked away, neatly folded his naked tail over his lap, and set his work duffle over it. He’d long ago covered the GaleHome sanitary services logo with a series of promotional patches for the companies Galehome had sent him to clean for – Rolson Dynamics, Hallman Electronics, Coronet Investment Management, even Norec-Naroi – but people didn’t avoid him because he worked sanitation.
Hartley knew it. The tourists knew it. The commuters knew it. Even Rick knew it.
He was a rat, and not one of the picture-perfect Giraud production line. He was a Larue, a street rat with fur that clumped into tufts no matter what shampoo and conditioner he used. Whoever had designed the geneline he’d been cloned from hadn’t cared about aesthetics.
As usual, he tried to ignore his isolation by staring out the window. This time, he glimpsed something he hadn’t seen before.
A flash of white across the side of a building, a fresh mural, or maybe graffiti. There in one blink, passed behind the tram a moment later.
He’d seen a pair of loving hands carefully enfolding and shielding a small white body, a curled shape like a natural rat, all curves. Clean. Beautiful.
Adored.
He tried to make sense of the flashed image, tried to fix it in his mind while he texted his roommates, Lana and Sylvester, to let them know he’d be back a little late, got off the tram at the next stop, and started walking back to it.
It was so stark in his memory as to be black and white. Then, as he tried to remember, it took on a more painterly, coloured rendition in his head... the curves became corners, the clean lines smudged. Gradually the whole of the image in his head became the measurements, angles and stroke order necessary to precisely paint it, like a layout diagram for painting ground-markings and safety symbols to code.
His mental image swam, but two things remained clear. First, the figure of a beautiful, loved rat. Accepted and wanted. Second, the fluttering in his chest, like flying, like hope. A conviction that if he saw the mural again, could make sense of it, everything would change. That the mural would change him, make him be beautiful, make him someone who could be loved. He just had to see it again. Just had to understand.
All nonsense, but he kept walking, trying to shield the strange little ember of hope in his chest from all his doubts.
The mural didn’t give him the same spark of inspiration, when he saw it again, but it was still beautiful.
The white rat protected in loving hands was painted across the back wall of a building, behind a parking lot, covering older graffiti in dancing colour.
The mural wasn’t of the rat, really.
It was of a woman in flowing red clothes. Her skin was a stylized tone, somewhere between tamarind rinds and statuesque bronze. She wore a queenly crown, gold in filigreed petals, and a single bindi dot on her brow. Sanskrit text Rick couldn’t read surrounded her in vibrant graffiti swirls.
A goddess, gently holding a white rat as though it were sacred. Smiling at it, turning it into the focus of her vast and powerful love. The afternoon sunlight turned its white fur into a blazing icon, and the way the artist had shaped the rat made it seem not just alive, but fluid. Like a river, or ocean wave – something naturally in motion, its curves hinting at life and vitality. As though it could be anywhere it wanted to be, and where it chose to be was here – within her hands, protected and admired.
The rat seemed... happy.
Rick still felt that spark of hope inside himself, but distantly, now. Hidden by the mural. But if he could get inside it, behind it, if he could stand inside the mural, maybe he could find that hope again and make it stronger.
Rick didn’t understand why the mural made him feel like that. The only thing Rick could understand about the mural was the sign around the corner – 7th Residential Hindu Mandir – because his high-school social studies classes taught him that Hindu temples were called mandirs.
“Hello. You like the mural of Karni Mata?”
The woman was Indian. Had approached slowly, clearly torn between wanting to say hello, and wanting to let Rick stand and stare. But he’d smiled at her, awkwardly, and she’d smiled back, and a few moments of that had apparently been enough for her to approach.
“Very much. Is that her name?”
“One of them.”


This was the first of two parts of “Visage

of

a

Vermin

Vandal”

by

Malcolm

F.

Cross, read for you by READER, with CALLSIGN. Tune in next time to see just how much paint Rick uses up discovering whether or not this moment of inspiration will change his life.

As always, you

can

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more

stories

on

the

web

at thevoice.dog,

or

find

the

show

wherever

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get

your

podcasts.

Thank

you

for

listening

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The

Voice

of Dog.

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