Fancy Rats

“I’d like one rat, please,” I told the man. His name was Mario, his name tag said, and he looked at me for a moment as though he were trying to solve a case on one of those procedural crime shows, before waving me over to a corner, near a noisy bird cage. “Do you want a regular rat?” he asked. “Or a fancy rat?”
    Frankly, I was stymied by the man’s question. Throughout my life, I’d attached a great many adjectives to the great many rats I’d come in contact with, but never did I use a word like “fancy” or even “ornamental.”
    “I’ll just show you one of each, and then you can decide for yourself,” the man said, taking note of the confused look on my face.
    As we walked to the rat station, I imagined little rats, wearing little top hats, little monocles and little tuxedos with tails on them. Maybe one of the rats goes to the other one and says, “Tally ho, Gerald. Would you have the time?” And Gerald, one of the fancier of the fancy rats, would produce the time piece from his coat pocket while demurring, “I say, why not just look at the clock tower?” The first rat, named Stanley, would say, “Old chum, it’s these blasted cataracts,” and Gerald would say “Well, as you like it, it’s half three.”
    Later that evening, Gerald and his wife Elaine would go to Stanley’s for an elegant dinner party, complete with Stanley’s wife Marie’s famed shepherd’s pie. They’d drink tea out of dainty chinaware and joke about politics and society, and what’s to be done with these working class rabble-rousers?
    After a grand and lovely evening, the couples would bid each other adieu, by saying, with a doff of the cap, “I bid you adieu.”
    It was all very elegant.
    But when we got to the case, there were no timepieces or tuxedos or top hats. Some of the fancy rats wore overalls, some of them t-shirts and shorts. Seemingly each piece of raiment was covered in paint. One of the fancy rats had a little Mercedes, but it couldn’t have been any less than 15 years old--the rest drove pickup trucks. I did notice some art on the walls of their single-story, Spanish mission-style homes, but they looked like those cheap reprints you buy from a frame store.
    “Well, what do you think sir?” the man asked.
    “They’re kind of fancy,” I said, defeated. “I guess.”