I knocked on Oscar’s door and they tumbled out from behind the screen, falling all over each other and skittering off into the bushes. I got one with my boot and scraped it off on the edge of the step. A series of latches and deadbolts scraped metal-on-metal, like a primitive Rube Goldberg machine, culminating in a rusty turn of the knob and the squeals of tiny bodies caught in the woosh of the door.
“Care package,” I said, holding a plastic bag over my head. “From Sarah.”
Noodles, a few vegetables, a thermos of coffee, our last few traps. It was more than we could spare, but Sarah had a soft spot for our surly neighbor. Oscar’s eyes went big at the sight of the bag. He had to be running low on supplies—I hadn’t seen him leave the house in over two weeks. The expression lasted only a moment before his heavy brow came down, squashing his eyes into their usual narrow slits.
“You didn’t have to bring me this.”
“You know Sarah.”
Oscar and I didn’t always get along. I went to the Philippines the previous summer and was gone for just over a week. I returned to find a single strip of grass mowed across my front lawn. Oscar’s version of subtlety. Since the mice arrived, Sarah at least had embraced a kind of truce.
I passed the bag through, blocking the doorway with my boot. Four or five mice made it in over my toes. I apologized, but Oscar didn’t seem to notice. The floor inside was dark and pulsed with movement. They ran three deep along the molding. Oscar stepped out and pulled the door closed behind him, blocking my view.
We stood together on the narrow stoop, his belly brushing against the zipper of my jacket. Oscar raised a palm to the sky. “Not so cold today.”
“It’s been warming up. They say that could be a good thing.”
“We’ll see.”
Oscar fell quiet, watching the clouds. His hair was matted behind his head and his cheeks had definitely thinned since I had last seen him. I shifted my weight and looked back toward my house.
“I’d better get back.”
“Of course. Say—you have any books?”
I cocked my head, searching his face.
“Yeah, we’ve got books. What are you looking for?”
“I don’t know. Something recent, maybe. I’ve read everything on my shelves a dozen times now. You can bring it next time.”
“Next time?”
“Unless you’re skipping town too.”
“No.” I could see my house across the next lawn. A line of mice darted across the roof and disappeared into the gutters. “Not yet. You?”
Oscar snorted. “Just bring me that book, son.”
I said sure and he closed the door, securing the endless bolts and latches, precautions which might stop a burglar, a murderer, or a looter, but could do nothing to stop the mice.
Back home, I dredged the bottom of the water trough with a rake and dumped the bodies into a five-gallon bucket, bloated and rank. I’d seen videos of farmers doing it before they were evacuated. The mice crawl all over each other for a drink, spilling over the sides of the trough like lemmings and drowning by the hundreds. When the bucket was full, I dumped them in a pile at the back of the yard to let them dry enough to burn. The grass bubbled like a tar pit as I walked, the slower mice crunching under my boots. That used to make my skin crawl, but now it sounded like music.
“I need help,” Sarah called. She was across the yard, leaning over the deck railing in one of my sweatshirts. Her hair was gathered in a loose bun, and she wore blue rubber gloves covered in grimy suds. She used the crook of her elbow to brush a rogue blonde strand from her face. “We’ve got a bleeder.”
Sarah turned to head back inside and I followed, watching her from behind. My foot caught on the rake and I cursed loudly, nearly falling face first into the grass. Sarah looked over her shoulder and rolled her eyes. We hadn’t slept together in weeks, and likely wouldn’t anytime soon. We tried, but the sound of their squeaking, the smell of their filth, the glow of their eager black eyes watching us… it was putting a kink in our plan to get pregnant. Sarah’s plan, really. We had endured months of doctor’s visits, charting, drugs—then came the mice.
“Right here,” Sarah said, pointing. I stepped carefully into the kitchen. One of the homemade traps had gone off, catching a sizable trophy by his haunches and chopping the bastard in two. He—the front half of him, anyway—tried to crawl to safety, leaving a trail of dark, viscous blood from stove to fridge, half an inch wide.
“Wow.”
“I’m not touching that,” Sarah said. “Sorry.”
I covered my mouth with back of my hand and swallowed hard. “Can I use your gloves?”
Sarah made a face. “I’ll go get yours.”
A crowd of mice had amassed. Onlookers approached their bisected brother, cautiously, noses twitching, turning back and forth between the torso and me. I swatted them away.
“Catch,” Sarah said, leaning into the room with her eyes closed. She tossed my gloves without looking, overshooting and depositing them with a slap across the gory trail. The onlookers scattered, but quickly returned, darting into the gloves so the hollow fingers wriggled with life.
“Sarah!”
Sarah opened her eyes and recoiled.
“Oh, yuck!” she said. “Yuck, yuck, yuck.” She danced out of the room and disappeared behind the wall. “I’m so sorry. Yuck!”
I looked down at the carnage and let out something like a roar. Then, I grabbed the scrub brush with my bare hands and went to work.
I brought Oscar a book later that day. Steinbeck, just to be an ass. Oscar didn’t come to the door when I knocked, so I slid the book into the mail slot, hoping it would still be in one piece when he found it.
A crow alighted on the telephone wire across the street, then another. A third followed, squawking at the others, who squawked back, beat their wings and stepped further down the wire, making room. Then, they were everywhere, the sheen of their oily feathers flashing from gabled rooftops and tree branches still winter-bare. I pulled up my jacket collar and walked home under their watchful eyes.
Sarah sat with her feet dangling from the hammock we’d hung across the living room after we had to burn the couch. She was bent over at the waist, painting her toenails, biting her lip in determination. Her thermometer lay nearby, on top of the notebook she used for charting.
I announced my presence with a loud, phlegmy cough, and she looked up, eyebrows arched with concern. My lungs burned as I launched into a full-on fit, making a racket that momentarily cleared the room.
“You haven’t been wearing your scarf,” she said. I shrugged and coughed again.
I hung up my jacket and checked my person for stowaways before climbing into the hammock. The TV was on, playing the same clips of cars piled up on Main Street, aerial shots of neighborhoods recently abandoned (radial waves of fur and tails fleeing as the helicopter blades beat down from overhead), and a guy waving a sign with the slogan FAGS BRING PLAGUES scrawled in black marker as if it rhymed.
“How’s Oscar?”
“He didn’t answer his door.”
Sarah looked up from her toes. A drop of pink nail polish gathered at the tip of the brush, dripping noiselessly to the floor. I watched as the pink dot ran across the room and disappeared into the wall. “Think he’s ok?”
“I don’t know that he was ever ok.” Sarah gave me a look and returned her attention to her toes. I changed the subject. “I saw some birds on my way home.”
“What kind of birds?”
“The kind that might be able to assist us with our little guests.” I nodded to our cat, who was lying in the windowsill, swollen belly sticking up into the air, watching her prey scurry across the on the floor, disinterested. “We’re clearly due reinforcements.” The cat let out a kind of dazed mew and, with some effort, rolled over.
“There’s going to be bird poop everywhere,” Sarah said, setting the bottle of nail polish on top of the bookshelf we’d been using as an end table. She fanned her toes with her hands.
“There’s already poop everywhere.”
“And now there will be even more.”
Sara was quiet for a moment. On TV, a reporter was talking over video of a farm west of town, burning, the crumbling barns and silos barely visible in the flames. Sarah’s lips were pressed together, her face emotionless. Her red cheeks shone in the TV glow, and I wondered if she’d been crying.
• • •
According to the calendar still clinging to the fridge, defiantly beyond the reach of tooth and claw, the next day was a Tuesday. Such designations had become meaningless to us, but this day promised some significance. State officials, including the Governor, were scheduled to hold a press conference to discuss the situation, which had spread, according to news reports, beyond our county and threatened the entire Eastern half of the state. The date was also double-circled, once in pink marker, once in blue—looping around and around, like an endless cycle of hope and disappointment.
The sky was black with crows; circling, diving, attacking, and retreating, beaks full. Furry bodies coursed along the curbs like rainwater, flowing into sewer grates away from beak and talon, the unlucky ones splashing over the sides into the grass. White paste coated everything, attracting dirt and fur and pellets, blending into a sickly grey. It was as if mankind had been deleted from the ecosystem—the top of the food chain had been severed and the world was moving on without us. Sarah and I could only stand at the windows and watch, sidelined. At the end of the block, Oscar’s house stood stark and blank; lights out, shades drawn. Maybe the old bastard finally bugged out, leaving us to be the only fools still hanging on.
Inside, Sarah and I fell quietly into our now familiar routines. If the birds’ arrival had any effect on the situation in our home, it was that more visitors were being forced to take shelter inside. This meant extra traps for me, and extra clean-up for Sarah.
The local hardware store had run out of conventional traps two weeks earlier. They couldn’t keep them on the shelves—the clerk said people were looting them. I had to drive twenty-five miles to find more. This was before the roads were closed, slick from guts and running mice. The stockpile lasted until I let Sarah convince me to give the last few to Oscar. He probably hadn’t even set them. Why bother setting ten traps if you don’t have a hundred more?
I had been building traps of my own to supplement the conventional variety and make them last longer. I used supplies from around the house. Bleach in a shallow bowl, two forks like a bridge rigged to collapse under the slightest weight. A cleaver on a hair trigger under one of the cabinets, which I dubbed The Guillotine. My proudest achievement was a trap I called the Electric Chair: a thin layer of water in a tray, sweetened with honey and electrified with strips of live wire.
Set, dispose, clean, set. Repeat. It felt like infinity.
Filthy and exhausted at the end of the day, Sarah and I collapsed into the hammock. She had been in an uncharacteristically good mood since morning; whatever had upset her the day before appeared to have faded. I reached for the remote and turned on the news. The anchors were discussing the Governor’s upcoming speech, anticipating that she would declare a state of emergency and call for Federal assistance.
“Lift your shirt,” Sarah said, reaching for a pack of baby wipes. The tub was more effective as a drowning pool than a shower, so we’d been using the wipes to clean ourselves up each night. I took off my shirt and Sarah scrubbed my back and shoulders, then turned me around to reach my chest and arms. The wipes left a thin film on my skin that smelled like lavender and talcum powder. A hot shower would be a dream, but I was grateful for anything that got rid of the grime that covered our bodies and coated our lungs.
When Sarah finished, she handed me the pack and turned around. She pulled her shirt up over her head, her hair coming undone and falling across her shoulders. I pulled out a wipe and followed the curve of her ribs. She reached back and pulled her hair over one shoulder. I leaned in and kissed her neck.
“Not until you’re finished,” she said, pushing me away playfully. I pulled her down onto her back in the hammock and traced her collarbone, then the tops of her breasts. Pulling out a fresh wipe, I dragged it across the skin of her stomach, down past her navel, and pulled down her shorts.
“Wait,” she said. “They’re starting.”
A podium stood on the upper floors of an office building downtown. Flashbulbs went off in a wave and the reporters erupted with questions as the Governor made her way to the makeshift stage, her face solemn and deliberate. At the podium, she lifted her hand to quiet the room.
“This is an unprecedented time for the people of our state.” She said. She paused to look around the room. A truck rumbled by in the streets below. We could just make it out through the window behind her: a snow plow, clearing mice. “It is a time for unprecedented action. Over the past three days, we have begun mobilizing a team of—”
—A light flashed in our living room as something popped and fizzled behind the TV. The screen went dark and the room filled with the sound of squeaking and scratching claws, and the musky odor of burnt fur.
“No,” I said. Sarah unleashed a barrage of curses at the TV and at the charred mouse. I had never heard her talk like that and couldn’t help but laugh. She was annoyed at first, but soon joined in. I pretended to collapse on top of her in frustration, and kissed her, taking the opportunity to unclasp her bra. After a moment, she pulled way and looked in my eyes.
“This is good timing,” she said. “I’m ovulating.”
I became, at that instant, acutely aware of my face and body, to an almost superhuman degree: the expression I was making, my body language, the speed of my breathing. It didn’t matter—Sarah saw my eyes widen, felt me pull away that fraction of an inch. Her lips turned down in disgust and she pulled herself up. She sat with her back to me and her arms contorted behind her, struggling to re-clasp her bra.
“We had a plan,” she said.
“We’re not giving up on the plan.”
“I brought up the mere possibility of getting pregnant and you looked like you were going to throw up.”
“Look around. If we do it here, she’ll come out with buck teeth and a tail.”
“She?”
I felt my cheeks color. “Or he.”
“Why are we still here? Why don’t we leave?”
“We’re almost through this,” I said. “The rain has stopped, the weather’s warming up. And the birds—that’s good news.”
“I don’t care about birds.” She looked at me, her eyes narrowed and fiery, tears just beginning to form. “You’d rather live in this shit-filled house than have a baby.”
“Where would we go?” I said. It was a question I had asked myself a thousand times and answered a thousand different ways, each ultimately proving inadequate. We were upside-down on the house even before the mice. Our credit was in shambles. We’d already been rejected for three apartment units. I hadn’t hid any of this from Sarah, but she refused to accept what we both knew—we were trapped.
We argued, hitting all the familiar notes, circling through all the tired arguments, until neither of us was willing to continue and we fell asleep, back to back, in the hammock, surrounded by the familiar lullaby of scratching claws and snapping traps.
I dreamed about mice. They were crawling all over Sarah, scratching, squealing. The birds watched from their perches, patient and cold. Sarah was begging me to help her and I shoveled the vermin off with my hands, but they kept coming, endlessly, until she disappeared into them and all that was left was a wriggling mass of fur and tails. Sarah shook me awake.
“Sorry,” I said, rubbing my eyes. “Bad dream.”
“No,” she said. “Something’s wrong. Do you smell that?”
Intermingled with the potent blend of filth fermenting in our living room, there was another scent hanging in the air: something was burning. I laced up my boots and hopped down from the hammock, little bodies crunching and squealing under my feet. I checked the kitchen; it was clear. I looked upstairs; clear. The scent was stronger in the garage, but still no fire. I went back through the house and out the front door. I nearly tripped over something on the steps. Steinbeck. Oscar.
Flames curled from Oscar’s windows, sending up a column of black smoke that gathered like a raincloud hovering over the roof. The birds sat like gargoyles, their feathers twitching intermittently, as if in hungry anticipation. I ran to Oscar’s front door and pounded with my fists. The wood was so hot it stung my hands. The heat was unbearable against the bare skin of my face and chest, and I had to take a few steps back. Sirens whined impotently in the distance; they wouldn’t make it in time, if they made it at all.
Sarah appeared beside me, still undressed. The orange glow cast odd shadows across her face and shoulders and the tops of her breasts, like tribal warpaint. I took her hand. We watched the flames climb and dance on the rooftop as thousands of grey bodies poured from the house like oil into the sea, tails singed, fur blackened. Oscar remained inside.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Refe Tuma is a Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize nominated writer with stories in Necessary Fiction, the Wigleaf Top 50 Longlist, and elsewhere. His first book, co-authored with his wife Susan Tuma, is called What the Dinosaurs Did Last Night (Little, Brown 2014) and is available online and in bookstores worldwide.
LF #073 © 2015 Refe Tuma. Published by Little Fiction | Big Truths, January 2015.
