Small Things

I am a mouse killer. A very good one too. My methods are unorthodox but they get the job done. Last week, I disposed of one at work, where it was stuck to a sticky pad, but I didn’t have it in me to end its suffering. I wasn’t sure I was deserving of this power, this terribly final act, no matter how small it seemed. This is new for me. I learned at an early age that a lot of life is suffering, especially for small things. Small creatures, small minds, small beliefs, small power. I understood innately that it was eat or be eaten, exert your power or be crushed under another. I was a vigilant child, obsessed with power, and obsessed with proving I had some morsel of it; in this way, I ended up killing my first mouse when I was twelve years old.

My parents bought a two-acre ranch during that slip of time right before I hit puberty, when I simmered at every passing glance and burned red for no apparent reason other than the exhausting ordeal of being a small young thing suddenly aware of how embarrassing being alive was. That old house and the surrounding land experienced the brunt of my coming to terms with wanting to know and be known without seeming like I actually cared. I hauled buckets and buckets of pink and white rocks that summer, my dark head absorbing the heat from the dry sun while the glittering pearlescent sheen in the rocks somehow repelled it. Each time we geared up to dump a bucket onto the gray tarp, the skitter and flutter of mice would undulate briefly, too quickly for us to do anything about it. Still, every time, my father hollered at us to get them. I tried to tell him that if anything, his yelling was warning them of the incoming avalanche, but he continued to yell and stomp at every dump. I didn’t care about the mice, I was ensnared in my own misery. At most, I enjoyed seeing my father run around across the tarp like a fool, but I also knew his wrath would quickly turn to us the longer he failed. I dumped my bucket of rocks and dragged myself back to the pile on the other side of the yard, away from all of them.

“Look what I found…”

I was hefting my new bucket back to the gray tarp when my father called from the barn. He was positively gleeful as he trekked back with a long, skinny, spiral shaped metal rod in his hands. I could feel the heft of its weight just by looking at it. It would be dangerous, if effective.

“Ah, what do you think you’re gonna do with that, Ali?” my mother scoffed, gloved hands on hips, disbelieving as he hoisted it in his hand, a deranged grin lifting his mustache in a cartoonish gesture.

“I’ll get them with this!”

My mother and I looked at each other. We already knew this was a lost cause and we would have to let my father simply tire himself out or throw a tantrum before we would see the end of this.

My mother shook her head and went inside for iced tea and I stood and watched my father stomp heavily over the tarp, stabbing with his makeshift weapon, always a second too late. Finally, after the tarp was peppered with dozens of fresh holes (and escape routes, I told him) he admitted defeat. Shaking his bald head now red with sun and frustration, my father grumbled back into the barn for a cigarette and a new plan of attack.

Throughout this exchange, I was sitting on an upturned bucket a distance away, very certain that my father could cause more damage to one of us accidentally than any mouse with that rusty wannabe spear. My mother had officially quit for the day so I decided I could too. I didn’t care about the outcome of the mice versus my father; it had been entertaining and now it was over.

But as I started walking back to the house, I saw one. It made its way behind the fold of the tarp against the cement blocks that made the boundary of the plot of rocks. I paused. I watched the place where I saw the mouse disappear. I let my breath go slowly, waiting for the tarp to move again, for some small twitch that would tell me a living creature took shelter there. It didn’t.

My whole life, and still to this day, I don’t trust myself. Before I make any decision, I have to ask everyone around me what they think. I doubt and question and search for that gut feeling without ever really knowing what it’s supposed to feel like. I am tentative, as a rule, but the exception to my rule is that during a few rare moments, I am possessed with such conviction that it propels me to act without thinking. I just know. I just knew that mouse had paused right there, snug against the blocks and seemingly safe. I imagined that I could see its shadow behind the tarp, quivering until I left. Just as I knew it was there, it also knew I was here. Certainty, and an agreement between two small creatures.

The rod was tantalizingly nearby. It was within arms reach if I squatted and merely stretched my hand out. I kept my eyes on the spot where I was sure the mouse still waited and slowly dropped to the ground. I picked up the rod, silently shifting my grip as I rose back to a crouch. No thought, not even a sigh. In one breath, I stepped forward, lifted the rod and brought it down straight and true. I knew in that instant of making contact that I had hit with precision, my gut roaring not in my stomach but in my chest, a blazing, giddy beat that was suddenly unmistakeable, unbearable.

I won’t lie to you. As the adrenaline and primal glow of victory, of being right, rushed through my body, I felt proud. I was positively manic with it. I couldn’t believe what I had done. I couldn’t believe how everything in that moment had aligned so perfectly, so violently, so without my control. The first thing I wanted to do was tell my father. Me, a small thing herself, had done something mighty, difficult, powerful. It defied the laws of nature. For all the scoffing and eye rolling I had done, I wanted to prove to him that just because I was small and silent, did not mean I wasn’t powerful.

The gray tarp was made of some type of tightly woven, fibrous cloth, and there was a little substance around the hole the rod had left. I knelt and peeled the tarp back with my thumb and forefinger and there it was, a small soft thing, torn apart, but still recognizable. I remembered the feel of the muffled impact of the rod, and then tried not to.

I can’t tell you that I felt bad. I didn’t feel guilty. Sure, the sight of the little mangled body had unsettled me, but I was morbidly fascinated with blood and physical trauma as a child (which grew into a Grey's Anatomy and then Twilight obsession) and so even then my heart beat madly with forbidden delight. I was simply drunk on power. There was no other way to explain it, but after knowing only an existence where I was the smallest thing, the easiest and most likely to crush, I saw an opportunity and took it. I crushed another being simply because they were small and happened to cross my path.

I tossed the rod over the fence, into the patch of hungry weeds that grabbed at your legs every time you passed through; they hid all manner of small things.

Since that day I’ve killed many more mice. Mercy killings, done with a grimace but quickly, with compassion and sorrow. I persuaded my roommate to get a humane trap for the mouse entrenched in her bedroom, and when it finally ventured in with the promise of peanut butter, I carried it gently, upright, to a patch of grass outside our apartment. I couldn’t figure out how to release the trap door and it squeaked in protest before the door slid open and it dropped sweetly into the grass. It paused for a moment, adjusting to the sudden change in environment, and, I hope, the realization that it wasn’t going to die, at least not by my hand. A moment later, it nosed its way into the grass and disappeared, like so many small things.