Gallipoli, part 3

That night, or early the next morning, in the long pale shadows of the mint-colored moon, I went to Kate Winslet and knelt on the floor and made a prayer. I am not like you, I said. I leaned close and I whispered: This is like loving. You and I, we are like as in love. The questions are unsolved. There is a terrible doubt. We are not close, we see each other across a vast distance, plain and clear and flat as a map. It is not a shriek, a howl, a bellow: it is a rustling, persistent as a faucet drip, overflowing the basin and running over the floor.

Back in bed, Alice hit me in the face while dreaming (I later learned) of battling Mothra, big as a building, as mousely men fled underfoot.

VI.
Two weeks later, and Alice nagged me to change the bedding of the mouse tank. I needed a place to put Kate Winslet while I emptied the tank: an empty cardboard oatmeal cylinder with a plastic lid that I poked air-holes in with a knife. The mouse might have had some kind of disease, I wore a yellow dish-glove with which to pick her up. She was quick and acrobatic, I chased her with my fingertips for minutes before I caught her by the tail. When I lifted her up she began to squeak and squeak, eeee-eeee-eeee-eeee-eeee-eeee-eeee, and shot piss into the air at me in terror. I dangled her, pissing and squeaking, over the mouth of the oatmeal cylinder, but every time I got her close she grabbed the rim with little mouse hands and tried to run down the outside edge. Back up: pissing and squeaking; back down: grabbing the rim. This too went on longer than I thought it could have, until she spun and bit my other ungloved thumb and I squeaked and dropped her to the floor and she ran and she vanished. My thumb bled out of both sides, two tiny incisions, top-teeth and bottom-teeth; now I knew how her children felt under that cold and sudden bite. My sweater was blotched with mouse-piss. I was alone in the kitchen.

VII.
She has not gone far. She haunts me now. She climbs through the oven at night, up through the inside of the stove, out by the stove-coils to scavenge the countertops. She quietly clamors, she rustles and rummages, she chews through it all and poops it all out. She’s behind the bookcase now, I tell Alice. She ran by when you were out. Alice squeezes my hand and says nothing. A trap is set. Her cage is waiting.