by Jennifer Love
I’d become accustomed to the scalp scent of her bowed head when she knelt in prayer before my perch on her desk, which she’d been doing increasingly often since the death-prediction incident. There was a palm-sized, purple velvet pillow for me up here, adorned with gold tassels and surrounded with precious objects selected and arranged with care: seashells, Polly Pockets, river pebbles, and a Snapple cap full of her own baby teeth.
She’d never believed in the tooth fairy. She always knew there was some reason greater than quarters or even dollar bills for the mysterious cycle of enamel in her mouth.
It is within my easy nature as a mouse to remain perfectly still, such that I might hear the words she might be forming down there – but as usual, all that’s audible is the gentle pressing and parting of her lips.
How she might have come to see me as a savior is impossible to know for certain, but it might have something to do with her having been mine. In quiet moments like these, I often imagine the possibility that she and I are the same spirit poured into two vessels. Everything that we feel for each other intrinsically laced with the percipient quality of looking into a two-way mirror.
***
Inside my head I call her a different name every day. Names like Magdalena and Delilah, names like twisting reeds, Carmelita and Suzanne, El Dorado, El Cerrito. Pasta Puttanesca. Low-Slung Boot-Cut Jeans.
She calls me Meatless Patty, but often just Patty, and less often Meatlissa. More than any of these, she tends to simply call me little mouse. That’s what she would say before dipping her hand into the home she’s made for me out of the third drawer from the bottom of the chest beneath the window—hello, little mouse.
Popping me into her pocket to leave the house—let’s go, little mouse.
The first time she’d called me this had come with a qualifier: poor little mouse.
This was when I was still a field mouse, occupying the brushy space beyond the backyard fences of her neighborhood. A loose wolfhound had impaled me with its acorn-sized tooth, so wide and sharp as to dwarf my organ system: a bite that should have killed me. Magnolia, only a little child then, had used all the force of her tiny body to yank the dog away and then—so gently as to evoke a sensation of floating—lifted me in her cupped palms.
That close to Pincushion’s tear-swollen eyes, I could feel everything that she was feeling: the heave of fear that turned her in the direction of her house, the frantic current of guilt that made her start running. She was so scared that I was going to die; such a shame that I could not tell her that I was immortal. How was a little girl supposed to know about such things? How was she supposed to consider them while mouse blood pooled in her palm?
On the floor of her bathroom, Santana pressed the corner of a towel to my body, then an ice cube, which seemed to absorb the pain that had set in once the adrenaline wore off. I did not feel the needle entering and exiting my flesh, but I later observed the petite red starburst that she’d created to close up the dog-tooth hole. She snipped away the threads two weeks later, but their phantoms have never left my side.
As she stitched, I focused my energy on the heave of fear, the current of guilt still hissing insistently from the very core of her. I tried terribly hard to absorb it all into what was left of my body. Ice cube, I commanded my body. The creases in her palms are the veins which carry these feelings from her core to her extremities. Be like ice and stop it cold.
It seemed to work to some extent, because by the time the job was complete, Tangerine had stopped crying. “I’m so sorry, and it’s hard to explain,” she said, gingerly raising me to be level with her eyes again—which, at the time, were difficult to look directly into, bright amber as they were and flanked by lashes still glossy with tears.
“This wasn’t how it was supposed to be. But this happened for a reason.”
***
Out in the field behind the backyard fences, it became evident that I had lived too long.
I saw generations of my family grow up, scatter, and die. All within a year, sometimes closer to two. They had babies who had babies who did the same.
I lived on.
Twenty years, then thirty.
Then I lost count, the pile of oak galls I’d been using to keep track washed away by a particularly powerful early-spring storm.
I cannot forget my observations of the dead body of my father up close, transfixed by the incredible complexity of his paws that I’d never properly perceived throughout his living days. The subtle divots between the metacarpals. The pink phalanges tapering into elegant points – and even the microscopic hairs extending beyond those points, so fine as to appear almost translucent.
In the beginning, I was grieving every family member’s passing. For several early years, I anticipated my own death, which always felt like it should be coming any minute. Eventually, I lived long enough to forget grief, accept my immortality and understand that I would be alone in my experience.
This is the pit into which I was descending when I first felt the gentle pressure of Tandoori’s supplicating hand.
***
“Mrs. Gallo said that you are smart and capable, but very quiet.”
I recognized this as the mother’s voice on the other side of the drawer. As usual, Beach Cabana said nothing back to her mother. She was mostly a girl of few words, and often of none. I gathered that the mother was filling her in on the contents of the third-grade parent-teacher conference that she’d just returned from. After she’d bid good night and left the room, Cabana almost immediately started muttering to herself. Once she’d opened the drawer and lifted me out, I could hear the individual words that she was repeating, over and over in a staccato rhythm: “Smart, capable, very quiet. Smart, capable, very quiet.”
She would continue this until the day that she went mute.
***
I remember the day that she went mute, because it was the first time that she entered the room without greeting me. She just closed the door behind her and got directly into bed, from what I could judge by the susurrus of linens shifting and small groan of the mattress depressing. She didn’t even open the drawer.
Then she must have stayed still for a very long time, because there was no more ambient sound in the dark that proceeded. The overwhelming bewilderment and pit in my stomach were difficult to place – mine or hers? Same with the shock, fear, rage; sensations churning faster than I could name them, their origins cluttered up by the many reflections of her that I carried after our six years of proximity. But the sense of betrayal I knew to be my own; it felt as if she were withholding something from me.
***
“Cool if I smoke in here?”
This voice—low and throaty, yet punctuated with the unpredictable brays of a lawnmower ripping to life—had entered the sphere of her bedroom as of recent. Mostly late at night, after the house had been silent for hours. As usual, Delirium said nothing, and a grassy funk of smoke seeped in through the crack at the top of the drawer. She lifted me out and placed me on the windowsill, then opened the window to let in the cool night air.
It was harder to keep track of years passing from within the drawer with fewer materials available, but my best estimate was that she was twenty by now. She had started college and seemed to be studying evolution, from what I could gather from the books and notebooks that she left strewn across the floor.
She still didn’t speak, which didn’t seem to bother this person who always had plenty to say. He hadn’t been shy about making his assessment of me when she had first introduced us: “That is the most fucked-up mouse I’ve ever seen.”
An Eye of Horus rested against his pale chest, left exposed by the unbuttoned silk shirt he was wearing. A crust of black makeup underlined his eyes. I wouldn’t have thought a human who looked like this could hold such judgments for a mouse like me—but I digress.
“We’re going out to the Sutro Baths tonight. There’s gonna be a concert in the tunnel. Three bands. My buddy’s playing drums for this sick neo-crust project. Starts at 1 a.m.”
He was leaning back on his hands, gazing half-lidded at the crease where the wall and the ceiling met. Not at her, where her fingers with their overgrown fingernails had started shifting in her lap, rearranging themselves until a nail was wedged beneath a craggy layer of scabbed-over flesh. Blood oozed forth and collected itself into a small, neat bubble.
This was a habit she’d picked up around the time that she’d gone mute, one which forced my attention to her hands. I realized now, as the man droned on about how the sound might be too sludgey to be classified as crust, how similar her hands were in construction to my own paws. The subtle divots between the metacarpals. The phalanges tapering into elegant points. With a pang, I realized that these were not my paws that I was envisioning but my father’s, and as if summoned by the pang, Delirium turned around and made eye contact with me.
“Anyway, are you ready to head out?” His voice could whir on forever just like a lawnmower, too.
I didn’t know why, but with my dead father’s paws freshly occupying my mind’s eye, I was convinced that she should not leave the house. That raw, scraping sensation from when I’d first observed his lifeless body was shuddering through the remains of mine, causing me to vibrate against my will.
“Yo, wait—what’s wrong with the mouse?”
Delirium approached slowly, her eyes wide and furtive, as if she knew that there was some message here but was straining to receive it.
“Oh, we really gotta get going, actually. Kev just said he needs a ride, and that fool’s in San Leandro, so it’s gonna be a bitch to get him.”
Delirium ignored him.
“Come on, babe. Mouse is just doing fucked-up mouse things. Maybe it’s gonna die soon. You know they only live a year or two?”
Delirium’s voice, which I remembered as clear as day from when she was a child, rang in my head: What is it, Meatless Patty? What’s wrong?
“Put it back in the drawer. We’re out.” With this, he approached her from behind, hooked an arm across her chest, and pulled her into his body, causing her to stumble backwards. It almost looked as if she might go with him, easing as she was into his chest with half a smile for a moment before straightening. That small moment made me panic, scramble for something more powerful to get the message across, and before I could think better of it—fling myself from the windowsill, to plummet as hard as I could towards the floor.
***
He died that night, after drinking himself to oblivion inside of the tunnel, piling his friends into his car, and driving it off the edge of the bridge. There were no survivors.
I learned all of this from eavesdropping on a phone conversation of her mother’s, voice vapor-thin but still penetrating faintly through the wall.
When Dystopia first received the news, cross-legged on her bedroom floor as I looked on from the edge of her bed, she’d had a panic attack. She cried so hard that it sounded as if she were struggling to breathe, and no finger was spared from annihilation.
Then she grew very quiet, turning to stare at me for several long seconds before crawling over on her hands and knees. Then, her voice in my head again, immortalized as a child’s:
Patty, you saved my life.
A long pause where her eyes nearly vibrated in their sockets, twitching as they were between each of mine.
You were trying to show me what would happen if I went with him. Right? You did that on purpose… to keep me home?
She’d refused to go with him, shaking her head forcefully when he continued to tug at her body, and eventually folding herself over my splayed form to create a fortress within which I could slowly recover from the impact. After he left, she stayed on the floor with me until I stopped vibrating, and I ran back and forth across the length of the room to prove that I was all right.
I hadn’t yet known what happened when she hung up the phone and posed the question—you did that on purpose, right?—just saw my father’s paws once more in her bloodied hands and vibrated again; one hard and violent shudder. She slapped a paw over her open mouth. I must admit I didn’t feel unlike a god.
***
The prayers started up shortly after that, and proceeded every morning. She came to treat me as an oracle, consulting me for every question: vibrate once for yes, twice for no.
She asked me if her next boyfriend, a mild-mannered and consistently plaid-clad man from Oklahoma, would be the one; dumped him after I double-vibrated. She asked if it was even worth staying in school; registered for classes after my single vibration.
A question of unique gravity came on a cold evening when she burst into the room with uncharacteristic fervor, slamming the door with force behind her instead of the usual reticent click into place. I was grateful that she managed to handle my body with usual compassion while lifting me onto the velvet pillow.
Patty, I really need your help with this one. I don’t know what to do. There’s someone who hurt me a long time ago. He took my voice away. And… now he’s marrying my mom. I didn’t even know they were seeing each other. She was keeping it from me. And she’s actually serious about marrying him. My yes-or-no is… should I… you know, get rid of him? I just don’t see another way.
I’d never wished so badly to speak. Tell your mom what happened, I tried to respond, tensing my entire body in an attempt to focus up the message, but all she could see was the vibrating. Her brow furrowed with resolve.
So that’s a yes.
I vibrated again—two for no, I attempted pathetically to communicate, two for definitely don’t do that.
Thank you, Patty. I don’t think I ever would’ve thought myself capable of this if it weren’t for you. I know you can see the future and that you’re here to protect me. If you think that’s the best path forward, I have to trust you.
***
I did not want to be implicated in whatever she was planning. It was increasingly difficult to extricate whose thoughts were whose, such that I questioned whether the idea had been mine in the first place—and if it had, whether I could live with her suffering the consequences of a crime that I had ordained. It was too messy. The next time her bedroom door opened, I ran like my tail was aflame.
A pencil-sized hole in the wall of the laundry room was my portal, and the empty space inside that wall became my new home. My plan was to hide out and scope exits to the outside world at night, but after many laps around my new perimeter, no escape ever emerged.
This meant that I was the sole audience to the depraved howling of her mother not a week later, whose impetus I did not yet know for certain, but could guess with soon-to-be-proven accuracy. This meant that, after Bucatini had been taken away, I could sneak back into her bedroom and find myself tempted by a butterfly-stickered notebook that had been left next to my velvet pillow on her desk. It took some effort to lift the front cover, but the interior pages turned with a beguiling whisper beneath my paws.
I lost the trial and am being put away. This must be Patty’s punishment for me confining her to a drawer when she deserved all the open space of the field. Into a cell of my own. I accept her decision with grace.
At first I was devastated when she ran away, but I’ve come to understand why. Now I think about her hiding out in the bowels of the house, knowing that despite these lumbering bipedal creatures outsizing her by hundred-folds, she could always outrun us, and she could effectively hide. She is smart, capable, and very quiet. She is exactly what she needs to be.
Untitled
by Cyrus Carlson
Jennifer Love is an artist, writer, and Bay Area native. Her debut novel, Please Fear Me, is out now from Fairlight Books. Her short story collection, Punch A Hole in the Sky to Let in the Light, was published in August 2023 (5ever Books). Her short fiction and poetry can be found in X-RAY, Minola Review, Autre, and elsewhere. Find her online at jenniferlovewrites.com.
Rachel Coyne is a writer and painter from Lindstrom, MN.
Ignatian Literary Magazine 