(This probably isn't a 'normal' response to a dead mouse. But it's mine and I own it, whatever that means.)
Lovely Mouse
Last Monday, I stooped near the steps in my back yard to take a closer look at a dead mouse. I didn't know he was dead. He looked on the verge of taking a deep breath, of expanding his warm round middle before turning over in his sleep. I wanted to touch his jagged chestnut fur, give him the only petting of his brief life.
The mouse looked friendly enough, as though he had always been open to human touch. I crept closer, attracted to soft, relaxed eyelids. I think I remember long eyelashes. Lured to his side by the pink nose, his fat center. All rolled up in a fleshy bundle, he seemed not to have a tail at all. Was it the tail that repulsed me?
I nudged the mouse, expecting his eyes to widen, his feet to hurry him away to the field at the edge of the yard. I was grieved when he didn't budge, disturbed that he could be stiff with no outward signs of abuse. When I remembered, abruptly, last week's creeping rodent scampering past my feet in our basement, hunched low to the ground, sniffing his way to safety, his whip of a tail trailing his path, I squeaked. Not the same shriek that called Jeff to my rescue, promising to save me from unwelcome droppings and certain contamination. "I'll take care of it," he promised, placing poison in the mouse's likeliest haunts.
The lovely mouse means something else to me now, lifeless and plump on a bed of gravel just beyond the basement door.
This is an excellent example of what Dr. Davidson was talking about the other day when he said we should take the unexpected look at events, people, objects, etc. It would be one thing to write about the time a mouse scared you and you acted like a big sissy and had to have your husband come take care of it for you. While that would offer itself up to an examination of stereotypical gender roles, etc., it would also be quite expected. Writing about a mouse in this way, however, is quite a different thing. It is more unexpected and fresh, a different story than the one of dominant thought about women and mice. What I would ask of this draft, however, is WHY you saw the mouse differently? Why is the mouse only lovely in passivity, in death? Why when the mouse is "beyond the basement door" and outside of your house does it create a different response than when it scampers past your feet in your basement? Why is it interesting that you are now okay with the mouse when it is very likely that the poison you had your husband put out is what killed the mouse? In short, what is your reflection in regards to this mouse? Add that and you take this draft beyond reportage and give yourself a way to get off of the triggering subject.
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