Man or Mouse? 

When you’re locked in a closet, and it’s dark, and quiet because everyone went outside for recess, it’s peaceful, really. Better than being caught red handed, stealing Mrs. Pond’s hamster. She calls him Little Gooey, which is insulting. The girls make kissy faces and whisper his name into the cage, stick their fingers in and pat his head, which he hates. A name like Gooey undermines confidence in the entire genus and species. And kissy faces. Grant me patience. Even I want to run pointlessly in the metal wheel when I see those.  

“Can I hold him? Oh Pleasssse,” they beg and the poor hamster is squeezed by sticky hands. After, he has to wipe his whole body down with his little paws; then bury himself in the cedar chips. Girl fingers. Kissy face breath. Alas. 

I pat my pocket and Teeth of Greatness gurgles happily. He doesn’t know we’re in the supply closet because it’s dark inside my pocket and I brought broccoli like he told me to. He’s chewing away. Oblivious. Happy.  

I’ve been planning all week, to get him out, let him loose. I had him in my hand when Mrs. Pond looked up, so I shoved him in my pocket and asked to go to the supply closet for a pencil. And then the recess bell rang and there I was. In the closet, behind the shelves, trying to get him safely out of my pocket. Click. Mrs. Pond locked the supply closet. It’s as if the Crayon Bandido is going to rush in as soon as the class goes to recess I’ve almost fallen asleep when I smell something.  

“Do you smell that?” I whisper. 

Teeth of Greatness says, why yes, yes he does. He pokes his nose out of my pocket, goes directly to the darkest corner of the closet to gnaw and gnaw. Mesocriccetus auratus is a species known for teeth that never stop growing. Teeth that can chew through almost anything.  

Just as the class is coming back, just as Sally Jardini yells “WHERE’S GOOEY!” the hole is big enough for both of us. I wiggle thru and follow Teeth, the sound of his tiny claws, clicking away at a pace into the gloom. I’m not sure what I smell, but it gets stronger as I edge forward.  

A thousand pair of teeth click in unison, like applause when the star finally comes on stage. A roar of clicking. A horde of hamsters.  

“Why the human?  Oh Great One,” the closest hamster squeaks. The rest take up the chant. “Why why WHY?!!” 

“What human?” Teeth of Greatness asks and my nose itches. When I scratch – there’s whiskers. Behind me, a tail. My hands are small and clawed.  

“Squeeeeek,” I protest, blinking. The world has lost all color and things are blurry. Mesocriccetus auratus do not have good eye sight. They rely on a strong sense of smell to navigate their world.  

Teeth of Greatness pushes me back the way we came. “The girls are waiting for you.” He makes rodent kissy faces in my general direction.  

I follow the scent trail back the way I came, scurrying along. Teeth of Greatness has ordered me to retreat.  

Back in the cage, I find myself happy to run pointlessly in the spinning hamster wheel of shame. Going no where. Waiting for food pellets.

SO YOU SAY

She sees him arrive, indistinct in the morning fog, trees along the dirt road black and dripping in the rising heat. He sits on the porch glider, picks her book up, thumbs through the first few pages and puts it in his backpack. “We come in to this world naked and alone and exit that way too. You can’t take it with you. Am I right?” he says. “I love this writer.”

Perhaps he thinks she’s old enough to exit; soon she won’t need reading material? She’s never met him, so she can’t really imagine. He’s tall enough to be a man; she figures he’s twenty-five or six. He has a tidy goatee that suits his narrow face.

She’d taken the book off the shelf to read in the cool of the front porch, screened from bugs, sunlight dappled on the glider away from the heat of the kitchen. Twenty-five minutes until the glass jars came out of the boiling water to cool with a satisfying pop - the lids sealing summer inside for when the garden’s nothing but sticks and the sky goes black by 4:30.

“Is that your car? Can’t walk everywhere a man has to go. Am I right?” He puts one big foot up on the hassock. His boot laces are long, tied in knots so they won’t trip him. Shoe laces come in different lengths down at the supermarket or drugstore. Not hard to locate. She touches the scissors in her pocket, sharpened this morning ready to cut flowers, kale, shoe laces.

He looks like a boy to her. All soft in the face, hand out wanting something, like a kid. Or a man who doesn’t know women like her are not in the service business, too old for other things he might need.

“Jody’s not here,” she says.

“I can wait.” He lifts his red baseball cap, wipes his forehead, puts the cap back on, stretches his other leg so both feet rest on the hassock, settling in for the long haul.

“So you say,” she says and returns to the kitchen, makes a sandwich, gets a beer from the fridge, goes back to the front porch and hands both to the boy. He’s told her what she needs to know. You don’t need to drag out a tongue with pliers to get the truth.  

The boy twists the lid off the beer and drinks. “Ahhhh,” he says and wipes his lips on his sleeve, eats the sandwich. He doesn’t thank her. She’s wearing an apron over blue corduroy overalls. Patterned in tiny blue flowers - lace at the neck suggests femininity. She’s old enough to be his mother, if she started young, which she did.

He sees someone who caters to husbands, children, guests. She touches the scissors in her pocket.

“Hot one today,” he says. “All this talk about climate change. Now that’s ...” He rolls his eyes and holds the empty plate out. She takes it. Leaves him on the screened porch and returns to the kitchen. Washes the dish and sets it in the drainer next to the sink. Jody has sent this sort to her before. He wouldn’t be here if Jody had any interest in him.

When she goes back to the porch, she takes two beers. “Jody due home soon?” he asks

Boys been coming around for Jody since she was eleven and looking fourteen.

She takes a sip of beer and sits down next to him. Too close really. She can feel his shoulder muscles tense. His breath makes a puff coming out of his nose. Almost a snort of surprise.

Jody doesn’t live here with any sort of regularity. She comes by on Sunday to help weed the garden. She washes and hangs her laundry on the line. They drink iced tea and laugh, or read. Sometimes Jody sleeps over. Makes breakfast in the morning and washes up. When the house needs paint some man arrives to sand and scrape. The kind of man who says, “Yes Ma’am and no Ma’am,” and like they all do when she gets out her wallet, “Jody’s got that all took care of.” After scraping and sanding, the paint man said, “Jody said you wanted the trim yellow and the shingles green.” She didn’t know that was what she wanted, but when it was done, she liked it right well.

She slides closer to the boy until her thigh touches his. He crosses his leg, one over the other, hoping to make some space between them. She does the same and now her leg touches his again. She hums a little song and taps her foot so he can feel the song - its intense little beat tapping along, up his thigh.

“I can take you in my car tomorrow. Anywhere you want to go. I got a bed all made up in the back room so you can wait for Jody. It might be a while though,” she says. “But we can talk about climate change and the heat.” She wipes her brow with the back of her hand. “All night, if you want. You can go all night, can’t you?” The timer in her pocket goes off. The jars are ready to come out of the canning pot.

The boy stands up. “Do you have Jody’s number?”

“I got your number,” she says.

The boy shifts his weight between his feet, blinking and sweating. He looks at the door out of the porch, past the hedge that screens the house from the street. The air is heavy, thick. Locusts buzz in the trees back behind the garden where the woods begin. She tips her head back and drains the beer, runs her hand down her throat, over the matronly apron, slowly. She reaches for the scissors with the other hand. When Jody comes home, she’ll make a cake. Lemon. Maybe Poppyseed? The boy will be gone as if he never existed.

It’s Easy to Forgive the Dead

Damp rises from the ground and drips from trees that line the road. Elizabeth Flintham breathes in mountain air. Behind her, invisible around a slight bend in the road, her childhood home sits at the base of a forested rise that welcomes darkness like the doors of hell. Her feet are cold.

“You can forgive ‘em their trespasses when they’re dead.” Elizabeth’s step mother, Gus, holds the front door open. Inside, the house smells of damp.

“Forgiveness is the highest form of love.” Elizabeth sits at the kitchen table. It’s covered with newspaper; a pot of red geraniums, rootbound and gasping sits center. “Have you forgiven my dad?” she asks.

Gus’ smile lines wrinkle. “I forgave him for rototilling my perennial garden. But he used to find my stash of chocolate. Put the empty box back, then play the fool.” Her mouth thins. As Elizabeth recalls, Gus often had a black eye or two. The old man liked his coffee hot and he hated a dry pot roast.

Elizabeth thinks of her father, dead twelve months. She thinks about her sister, laid out in the parlor. Embalmed. Hands folded. You’d never suspect Paige nursed grudges like sweet, chubby babies. She’s a lovely corpse with a somewhat mysterious smile.

“I made a pie.” Elizabeth pours her coffee in the sink where some of last night’s dinner has turned to slime in the drain.

“I don’t know who’s coming today. When that boy died everyone blamed Paige for wearing her seat belt. I figure plenty of them that lives in town still holding a grudge against our Paige.”

“Because of Dad?”

“Your dad didn’t like people.”

“He liked Paige.” Elizabeth wipes the sink clean, puts the slime in the garbage. Dries her hands on a stained dish towel.

“He bought her that expensive white dress and all those flowers when she married that boy. Him and me got married at City Hall. Didn’t cost one cent.”

“Did you mind?”

Gus frowns. A tear slides out of her right eye. She shakes her head. “He’d have killed the boy twice over about them truck brakes if Paige’d been hurt.” Gus shakes her head. “A course, the boy was already dead, so that was that. I never figured your dad for suicide though. Too ornery.” Another tear slides out of Gus’s right eye. Why would Gus, of all people, cry for the old man? Doesn’t make any more sense than him killing himself. Paige was another story. She could be easy to love.

“The Sheriff took one look at my face and went looking for pill boxes, see whose finger prints were on em. Why would I want your father dead?”

Why not, is what Elizabeth thinks. “Of course you wouldn’t,” is what she says. “Whose finger prints were on the pill boxes,” she asks.

“They didn’t find no boxes.” Gus lights the burner on the stove under the pot with the coffee and points, her face turned away.

For one moment, Elizabeth has pity for her dead father offered this brown liquid every morning. She’d rather die than have another sip. He’d have been all broken up about Paige though. Pretty Paige. All smiles and venom.

No one comes to the wake. No one sits in the parlor with Paige and her eternal smile. No one admires how lifelike she looks. Elizabeth figures the coffin will keep the moisture out for a year or more. After that Paige on the outside will resemble what she was on the inside. Slippery and hard to understand. The money from the dead boy’s parents paid for the best coffin, lined in puffy silk, bronze on the outside. Paige, who’d hardly been a bride for a week was their son’s only heir.

Gus eats most of the apple pie Eizabeth made for the wake. “You always was a good cook,” she tells Elizabeth. “One thing your dad loved was pie.”

Elizabeth tosses the rest, cleans the pie plate, then wipes it with hand sanitizer. After Gus goes to bed, Elizabeth carries tools and trash out to the shed. She wipes the counters, washes the floors. She likes a tidy house.

In the morning, she calls the sheriff who arrives in about half an hour. His hat strap has made a permanent groove in the back of his bald head. He touches the brim, but doesn’t remove his hat. “Poor old Gus,” he says. “Her dad went like that too. One night in his sleep. Right after his wife passed.” He looks around the kitchen. The red geranium, watered and happy, sits in the center of the table, cheerfully matching the flowered table cloth Elizabeth found in the hutch. The counter tops are clear of debris. Tools are put away where they belong. French Roast brews on the stovetop, now clear of grease.

The hearse arrives while the sheriff is upstairs. Two men go into the parlor, close the coffin and roll it out. The sheriff comes down, talks to the two men. They carry Gus out, put her in the hearse. The house is finally quiet and clean.

Elizabeth doesn’t like people, but she offers the sheriff a cup of coffee. Gus was old. The old man killed himself. Paige too – so sad how she lost her new husband. He’s knows the family He thinks he knows Elizabeth.

He doesn’t know a horrid disgusting slob Gus was. He didn’t see the slime in the sink or drink the unacceptable instant coffee. Elizabeth thinks about the many times her sister humiliated her, how her father beat her, and she forgives them. The dead are easy to forgive.