just because you haven't heard about mice doesn't mean they aren't shitting in my cupboard.

We have another mouse, James. I went to eat my wheat thins and there was a tiny turd in the bottom of the box.

No. Really? Guess I'll set the traps again.

Did I tell you about the Chex Mix mouse? We saw that one in the living room. James' mom had sent him some homemade Chex Mix in a care package, and James spilled it on the floor. A day later, because he didn't clean that up right away, a little gray flash in the living room. A gray ball of fur running along the sideboards in the living room, going behind the TV, behind the loveseat. If we had curtains, behind the curtains.

James' plan was to leave the Chex Mix on the floor, but since that's what the mouse was going for, to place three mouse traps around the Chex Mix. So he'd go for it, but there'd be no surviving. There was no way in without death for this mouse. We didn't even bait the traps; he just walked right into them.

I woke up the next morning to a mouse in the living room. I'm getting used to dead mice. I'm getting used to their curled paws and their thin, pink tails, and their buck teeth sticking out of their half-open mouths.

And I don't care about dead mice. I know I should care about mice, care that they're dying, care that all they're trying to do is eat, but I don't care. I should, but I don't. I should because it's the nice thing to do, to care about all creatures, to put myself in a position of just wanting to eat and survive, and finding that difficult with larger predators in the house. I know mice don't know better.

I do care when James insists that I look at them so I can learn, (about what, I don't really know) so that I just see what it looks like. This is a man thing, yes? The reason Ryan would be so proud of a shit he took he'd ask me to look at it, the reason my dad blows his nose in his hanky, his snot rag, in church, and then looks at it before shoving the thing back into his coat pocket. Men are disgusting. My stomach is queasy. James put on his gloves and grabbed the mouse trap--the one of the three that caught the mouse--and walked upstairs to show me the mouse, after I'd run upstairs to get away from it. I didn't forgive him for the rest of the day.

Two days ago, after I warned him about the new mouse, the shit in my cupboards, the skins from white beans with the meat of legume missing from the inside, he set the traps again and we got another one. This one wasn't clean. I'd missed it in the morning, woke up at five, dragged myself through the kitchen to the bathroom without turning on the light. Even left the bathroom after my shower and went through the kitchen again, got dressed, went back through the kitchen to the bathroom--all without seeing the mouse. How I missed it, I don't know, because as I was putting on mascara, James knocked on the bathroom door and said something along the lines of did you see all the blood?

I made him describe it. A pool of mouse blood. I screamed in the bathroom, closed the door, and planned for escape--a simple plan of walking out of the kitchen with my eyes averted to the right, as the mouse was to the left, right next to the refrigerator. The plan became more difficult when James hollered he chewed off his own leg from the other room.

Eventually I looked. I had to get some things out the kitchen before school, and I leered over the breakfast bar and saw the spray of blood. It was like spray paint, the globs of blood turning into into progressive dots of blood. He wasn't in the trap anymore, his head was smashed in from the metal bar. A head wound.

James cleaned it up when I was at school, sprayed the blood with cleaner and let it congeal when he was in the shower. He said the blood had turned green, as in Secret of the Ooze green.