I Saw a Mouse
Hey everyone, welcome to a rare two-edition week of Do You Know What I Love The Most?! Today’s Bonus Update isn’t the usual kind of topic I tackle in this newsletter, but I had a brief experience recently that stuck with me, and I felt the need to write about it and share it with all of you. I hope you find something to enjoy in it.
I saw a mouse at work the other day.
At first it was just a gray blur in the corner of my eye, streaking across a table or counter just fast enough to make me question what, if anything, I was actually seeing. But a few days later there it was, out in the open, scampering through the room like it was having the time of its life. I’d always thought of mice as scared, for some reason I thought they tried to avoid humans, but this one was practically frolicking, flaunting its presence in front of me.
Maybe this is strange, but I don’t think I’d ever seen a mouse in person before that moment; maybe not ever, but certainly not within a building like that. We had mice a few times when I was growing up, but I never actually saw any of them. They were phantoms, leaving only footprints, bite marks, and poop as evidence of their existence. My dad set traps for years and killed enough that the mice probably thought of him as some sort of vengeful spirit, but they nonetheless continued to stream into the house until we got a cat. But even the ones my dad caught were merely a story to me, not something I ever actually saw. Like most things in my life, the mice were an invisible anxiety I couldn’t face in person, but whose presence haunted me nonetheless, perhaps even more because they could pop up at any moment.
Finally coming face to face with a mouse, then, was surprising, and not just because I thought I was alone. It was smaller and cuter than I was expecting. I thought I’d be scared, but while I was nervous because of disease and such (anti-mouse propaganda, maybe?), I actually enjoyed watching it scamper around. Eventually it ended up under my desk, huddled by the space heater I keep running all day because my feet have about as much blood running through them as a vampire’s (I’m wearing three pairs of socks right now and they’re still cold). I would back up to a distance where I couldn’t hurt the thing and stomp my feet to make it run off, but it’d come right back to the heater a few minutes later.
The poor thing was pitiful, huddled up by that heater, looking up at me with those big Puss-In-Boots-in-Shrek-2 eyes. My compromise was turning off the space heater, and eventually it ran off. Later that day I noticed a dead mouse under a table in another room, far larger than the one I’d been watching. ‘The mother!’ I immediately thought, realizing that the mouse I’d been watching was a baby. That only endeared it to me more, explaining why it was so brazen, so cute, so pathetic, why it seemed to be having so much fun.
I’m not going to try to turn this mouse into a metaphor (“If you give a mouse a literary device” and all that), but it definitely felt like a bit of a kindred spirit, this confused little thing that didn’t quite seem to know how to be a mouse, but didn’t let that stop it from having a good time.
When I came into work the next day it was dead too, lying under that table next to its mother.
I had a direct line of sight on that table from my desk, and had to close a door so I didn’t spend all day watching them. Part of it was just that having something dead that close to me was unnerving (as a child I once spent months afraid that a tick my mom flushed down the toilet would come back out and attack me), but it was also just too sad of a sight.
The tragedy of a child lying down and dying next to its mother has stuck with me. What was it thinking in those final moments? Was it scared? Was it looking for comfort from a mother no longer able to provide it? I can’t think of a sadder way to go, and my lil’ mousy friend deserved better.
That was a Friday, so I told my boss I wasn’t coming back on Monday if those mice were still there. Cleaning up corpses is not in my job description, friends or otherwise.
ABOUT
“Do You Know What I Love the Most?” is a newsletter from Spencer Irwin about his relationship with the stories he loves. Spencer is an enthusiast and writer from Newark, Delaware, who likes punk rock, comic books, working out, breakfast, and most of all, stories. His previous work appeared on Retcon Punch, One Week One Band, and Crisis on Infinite Chords, and he can be found on Twitter at @ThatSpenceGuy. If you like this newsletter, please subscribe and share with your friends!