We Could Be Rats

Sigrid has little interest in the adulthood her small town expects of her. She works at the Dollar Pal, carries the weight of a difficult childhood and misses the friendship that once made life feel bearable. Her older sister Margit sees someone who refuses to grow up, but that explanation leaves much of Sigrid's experience untouched. As the sisters' perspectives unfold, family conflict, isolation and the damage of the opioid epidemic complicate the distance between them. Emily Austin centers a lesbian narrator within a story of sisterhood rather than a conventional romance, exploring how shared imagination can become a language for pain that neither sister has known how to discuss.