The Life of a Mouse

Brooke had always believed too much in people.

She heard it snap just as she was laying down with her youngest but she forgot about it until she began to put the dishes away. Then she saw it as she pulled the drawer under the stove. She’d set the trap next to the stove since that was where she had last seen the mouse, and her instinct that it would come back out from the same place had been correct. It seemed like it should’ve been more gruesome, but the trap had landed cleanly across the back of the mouse’s neck and the way it had been pinned made it look almost like the mouse had only been caught getting up to trouble because its face was turned up at her, its eye staring through the space between them as though watching to see what she would do next.

She paused for a minute, looking at it, thinking, and then she picked it up and deposited it trap and all into the waste bin. There were other traps, she thought to herself, that didn’t kill the mouse but only trapped it so it could be let out somewhere else. She realized she was looking out the window to where the July night was lazing in between the houses and the free insects were still carrying on. You know, she thought, it wouldn’t be a bad time of year to be a mouse. In the winter she would feel bad about dropping a live-caught mouse outside in the cold. But now it was summer and it wasn’t a bad time to be a mouse at all. But this one was dead. Nothing she could do to help it now.

The waste bin was mostly empty except for a layer of white flour that had been dumped in when she wiped down the board she’d been kneading the bread on, and the way the mouse had landed in the bin, it was still looking up at her with the same guilty, alive-looking expression. A trickle of blood had sept from behind its ears and colored a bit of the flour, but for the most part it just lay there on a pillow of white and kept staring at her. Too bad, she thought. It’s really not such a bad time to be a mouse. Not during this season. Then she got on with her cleaning and forgot about it until she went back to the waste basket to dump the food scraps from one of the plates.

And there it was, still watching. Only then did she realize that the mouse had made her think of her sister who hadn’t been seen or heard from in over a year. Had it been that long? It…

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