Sam Quinones

MICE AND RATS

Posted on February 28, 2011 by Sam Quinones

By Jane Blakeley*

I.

At eight, I fell briefly in love with mice. 

At my father’s house, I welcomed and them, running rampant across the carpet and into the cupboards and ceiling, jumping off my duvet when I came to bed, hiding behind the television.  They were my friends and constant companions.  They kept the house from falling down when my father and his boyfriend disappeared every night, smelling of marijuana and scotch.

Mice flitted into cracks and filled the walls, breathing life and safety into the structure like sleeping infants, surrounding me in a living insulation. They formed a solid and continuous microcosm – birthing, feeding, breeding, and dying within brick and sheetrock.

Because of this, I worshipped them daily.  I shared my food and my home with these creatures because they were gods. Gods who knew the power of continuity in a way I could not grasp.

I tried valiantly to catch just one mouse in my father’s home, to hold on to this elusive and private deity.  I set up elaborate traps that involved bells and boxes and crackers covered in peanut butter.  I wanted to learn its secrets, but was constantly denied.

They were not meant to be caged and studied.

II.

When I turned thirteen, my father moved in with a new woman – his new wife.  The house they rented together was crumbling, filth breeding filth, cracks expanding into larger cracks.  This woman and my bisexual father moved into a neighborhood that clanged with gunfire.  Here too there were rodents.  Rats had taken over.  They scratched with their talons in the basement all night and flaunted their fat yellow bodies in the alley during the day.  They chewed holes into cereal boxes and left excrement in the cabinets.

My father told me they didn’t exist.  He said the rats were in my mind.

For a moment, I believed him.  Perhaps, I thought, I was projecting my anger at my father marrying a woman.  Perhaps it was a reflection of disgust for my new body, which had become disproportionate and ugly like the creatures I saw.  Perhaps I was hallucinating.

What my father did not dispute were the two rats my stepmother kept as pets -a male and a female.  Those, he would concede, were real.  It seemed fitting, this uninvited stranger caring both for my father and for these foul creatures.  Like the basement rats, they too were obese and yellowed and stank of shit.  They too had bloodshot eyes and tails scaly as psoriasis.

She held them in her palms and let them crawl in the hood of her sweatshirt, fawning over their ugly faces.

She looked at them with the same eyes she used to look at my father, and my father acquired their features, sniveling his pink nose and bowing his head in her giant wake.  She made him ugly.

I wanted them dead.  I wanted to feed her rats poisons to make them convulse and writhe in pain.  I wanted to donate them to pharmaceutical labs where they could be injected with AIDS and Ebola and the lethal dose of Botox.  I wanted to drown them in Drano.

I did none of this.

In a few months, the female had given birth to a litter of blind and naked babies, squirming in cedar chips.

I could have flushed them down the toilet.  Their mother, however, took action where I was capable only of fantasy, and ate her litter.

One by one, I watched through glass cage the mother biting into each pinkie’s flesh and tearing away at muscle and organs, leaving her bedding saturated in blood.  When she finished, her enclosure was filled with their tiny bones.

I was sure my stepmother had influenced this.  She was given to mysticism and countless strange beliefs.  She told me anyone who ate meat would be ill forever and that dairy caused mental deficits.   I was sure she had chanted something to make the rat kill the pinkies in front of me.  The mother rat, I knew, killed her silent infants to prove my stepmother’s gross power – to prove she could do it to me too.

Though I was certainly too old, I was compelled by magical thinking into a frenzy of hatred and fear.

They were not to be trusted.

III.

At fourteen, I left my father’s house for good.

Through the rats at my father’s, I found filth and instability.

I wanted vacuums and bleach, clean sheets and unsoiled floors, safety and security.  For years after, I scrubbed desperately at the grout that refused to whiten, ran in the cold until my lungs burned, worked on essays until they were perfect, slept with a hammer under my bed.

Slowly, my equilibrium has returned.  But it has taken time away from friends and school and normalcy.  It has taken intense concentration and medication.  It has taken thousands of hours of worrying, panicking that things are dirty and the world will crumble.

Even now I struggle to stand straight.

__________________

*Jane Blakeley is a student at Johnson County Community College pursuing a degree in psychology and cleans houses to get by. Contact her at jblakeley08@yahoo.com.