There were mice in the place I used to live. They ate the
poison...
There were mice in the place I used to live. They ate the
poison in the basement and did weird things like walk on their toes into the
walls before they died in the filth below the fridge. Sometimes they didn’t eat
the poison and wandered around the stove. I was alone during a stretch of one
summer when many of them had made themselves comfortable wandering around the
kitchen in the evenings. I set out a trap, one of the old fashioned
neck-snapping traps. I made my way towards bed, shutting the small apartment
down for the night, and a loud snapping rattle came from the kitchen. I walked in to look
and then I walked out because whatever creature had been caught was twitching
still and much larger than a mouse. I waited in the dark of the living room
until the twitching might’ve stopped. When I walked in again, my brain could
not make sense of what I was seeing. Was this a massive mouse? Was this, please
no, a rat? I got closer. Was this a
mouse with two fucking faces? Was this a mouse with two heads and eight legs? A
conjoined Siamese twin mouse mutant? No, it wasn’t that. It was two mice. It
was two mice killed together in the neck-snapping trap. They’re brothers, I
thought. They’re small brothers who didn’t know and just wanted to eat the
marshmallow together. One was round. One was lean. They both looked soft. Their
eyes were open. I sat down on the kitchen floor and leaned against the cabinets
and cried. I didn’t want to be the only one to see. Meg Freitag in a poem
writes of two scorpions in her kitchen:
So, this was loneliness:
Two scorpions fucking each other to death in a glue trap
And no one to share it with.
[Olivia by Beth Van Hoesen, 1979]
