A Mouse in the House
The first you know of a mouse in the house is a blur of movement in the corner of your eye as you wonder aimlessly about the house. A few times, you think it is just a reflection but then these peripheral events start to take shape and with a feeling of dread your suspicions coalesce. Still you tell no one, not even your wife, especially not your wife. Maybe the mouse is just a one-off, an accidental interloper from the overgrown outside. But you start to keep an eye out for it.
One night, you are collapsed on the couch in a haze of inexplicable fatigue. Like life is somehow draining you of all creativity: reducing you, compressing your moments into jobs and tasks that must be done. Then, that now familiar blur: along the bottom of the wall and around the corner, out of sight. You jump up and creep quickly into the next room but it has vanished. Still you tell no-one. No need to make a fuss, you can deal with this quietly.
You don’t notice yourself, but the next day, a coworker points out that you have been whistling all day: three blind mice.
Again, late one night, you are upstairs just looking out the window for no reason. You were thinking about something or other but then, for some un-measured time, you have been just staring as the clouds and stars compete for the small patch of sky outside your window. And there is the mouse. It’s head appears first and then quickly withdraws. You swivel your eyes but dare not move. Then it appears from the slightly ajar door of the linen press and scurries quickly away. You follow on tip-toes but it vanishes again.
In the morning, you remember the incident but you start to doubt. Did I really see a mouse or was I just very tired, perhaps I dozed off and dreamed it. There are no signs of the mouse: no nibbled food, no droppings, no nest or smell. Well, there is that partly eaten muesli bar you found on the floor of the pantry once but apart from that…
It’s a week later and you haven’t seen the mouse. You’ve been sitting up at night, quietly by the window, waiting. Does the mouse really exist? You’re pretty sure that it does yet you still haven’t told anyone. You have a connection now, you and the mouse, an understanding or sorts and more than that, as you sit in the dark silence waiting, the thoughts of your mind unravel and peel away, drifting out the window and filling the sky. You think about your ancestors, staring at the same sky, looking up from their own occupations and activities of survival. The mouse doesn’t come tonight, but you don’t mind, you know you will see it again and the thought comforts you.
When I was breastfeeding my third boy, I had these late night mouse encounters. I used to turn the light on in the kitchen and then sit in the semi darkness in the lounge room, with a view of the kitchen. and ever now and again I would catch a glimpse of something, some sort of movement in the corner of the eye. At first I thought I was just tired and that the middle of the night was playing tricks with me, til I spotted it. Then there was the evidence in the cupboard under the sink. Damn thing proved elusive to catch in non toxic manners and eventually we had to resort to the terrible poison, so it died in the middle of the kitchen floor with two fascinated small boys looking on….
No no, you can’t kill the mouse! It’s a projection of your creative spirit finding freedom and waking you from the slumber of routine boredom. It is the spark of chaos that enables change.
“It is the spark of chaos that enables change.”
You mean like this?
I say put out the traps.
That’s what we did. Because the mouse had taken up residence in the top shelf of our pantry and fell on me when I pulled out a roll of al-foil one day. Let’s just say I had it out for the mouse after that. We found it in a death rictus soon after, half under the fridge. You should have seen the pile of shredded paper it was turning into a nest in the pantry, and a half eaten toffee.
I think you’ll think twice when your mouse starts nesting and breeding. Remember, they breed like rabbits. Or was that mice.
BTW, if you need something to jog you from your creative atrophy, you can also ask the hoons down the road to have another party…
Then again, reading your mouse post, I reckon that atrophy is broken. Nice one.
Or you could get a cat. That would liven things up a bit too.
The post is only semi-autobiographical and I know the mouse will likely need to be dealt with in the time-honoured traditional way. Also, I haven’t been feeling quite as flat as the character in the post. I was interested in trying to write a piece that expressed a kind of home-grown spirituality where the mouse represents a turning point from a mundane routine existence towards feeling a connection with life. On seeing the mouse I thought of how spirituality is often blurry, fleeting and hard to grasp. I’m not talking about the kind where you hammer a religion on top of it but a more personal self awareness. Maybe I should have prefixed the post with an explanation that I was attempting some creative writing.
It is very evocative. But I’m not sure a mouse is quite the right analogy. It eats away from within, takes over and inhabits your dark places….that makes it seem dangerous or destructive. Call me a girl, but I would prefer a butterfly…
Maybe a spider called Charlotte?
I’m very late to this, but I wouldn’t preface this by explaining that it’s creative writing, Matt: let your readers come to this unawares, and the piece has much more impact. (I thought it was excellent.)
And I liked the “mouse as spirituality” angle: to me, the mouse evokes a frisson of fear even though you know it can’t possibly hurt you, which I find a nice touch.