Page 51 of Play Nice

It’s nauseating.

I stand there, torn between abandoning ship, running to call Dad, or confronting the poor mice in the glue traps. Which, now that I think about, I only consented to in a moment of weakness. I didn’t want the mice in the house, but I never wanted them dead either. I wanted them to move out into a tree stump, where they could dress in aprons and serve each other tea in cute mouse-sized cups.

Racked with guilt about my role in their untimely end, I step deeper into the garage, letting the door shut behind me. I hold my nose, my breath. I flick on the light, a horrible fluorescent that makes it look even more like a crime scene.

I anticipate having to search for the traps, thinking they must have been strategically placed in dark corners, behind a snow shovel, whatever.

They have been strategically placed. They’re right in front of me, in a line snaking across the middle of the garage floor.

And they’re covered in mouse parts.

Not whole mice. Just parts.

A tail. A claw. A head. A half.

There’s no other half. No rest of the body.

Can a mouse survive in pieces?

Are these parts of the same mouse? Or different mice that all suffered the same brutal demise?

It’s disgusting. Baffling.

A massacre.

Dead mice in front of me. A dead mouse on the page of a book, in a scene that I dismissed as an Amityville-style embellishment. But now…

I step forward on tiptoes, my hands over my mouth and nose to protect me from the death smell.

There’s no blood. Wouldn’t they leak?

The tail, the claw, the other small and unidentifiable pieces…it’s possible the mice chewed themselves free. But the head? The half?

—

When I call Dad, he tells me to calm down and that he’ll come over after work.

I take an hour-long shower. I paint. I online-shop. I distract myself. I do not go back in the garage. I do not reread that scene in Demon of Edgewood Drive.

We’d find dead mice and chipmunks and squirrels and the occasional baby bunny near the stoop sometimes, courtesy of the neighborhood’s stray cats. That’s what Mom saw. Nothing that came from the throat of a man of God in some freak supernatural episode.

And what’s in the garage now—that’s not supernatural either. Just proof of a long-standing infestation. Just weird and gross.

Rationally, in my right, bright, shiny mind, I know this to be true. I know it.

I know it.

I hear Dad’s car pull up around five thirty.

“You were supposed to be checking every day,” he says as soon as he comes through the door.

“Good to see you, too, Daddy.”

“Hi,” he says, hugging me and kissing the top of my head. He hands me a grocery bag.

“What’s this?”

“Food,” he says. He takes off his suit jacket and hangs it on the banister. “All right.”