BALLAD OF THE PEST
DAY 366.
It was better this way, said my boss. I agreed. I got to save money and time on transit and junk food lunches. I could roll out of bed half an hour before my shift. Sweatpants were the best pants. And I was going insane.
Not cabin fever. Not “stir-crazy”. My home was my space, and it was safe. There was a leash around my neck, though, and it kept me at my desk, my fingers at my keyboard, the voices of my friends fading in my ears as I watched the day count go up and knew I would not get those back. My car was silent and untouched. The number in my bank account, stagnant. Can’t afford a raise now. Can’t afford to lower the cost of housing. Can’t afford to get away.
Day 366 is when I heard the first scratch.
Quick; a flash of noise and maybe a hint of a shadow out of the corner of my eye as it dipped into the kitchen. I didn’t have pets. I didn’t know what else it could be. Yet another thing to think about in place of the things I wanted to think about. I hoped it was just the one, taking a tour before settling into, hopefully, somebody else’s apartment. This one was mine, and in all my endless loneliness, this was not the kind of company that I wanted. I waited, and things returned to silence, and I clicked on another email.
Day 370, my friend’s aunt died. I hadn’t spoken to the friend in a while and had never spoken to her aunt. I clicked the sad reaction on Facebook and copy-pasted my sympathies into the responses. The aunt had died alone. The furnace had gone out during a freak ice storm. The landlord had not had it serviced in years. I pulled a blanket tightly around my shoulders and listened for the hum of the building’s heater. It remained as alive as I was, for now.
I heard a scratch from the kitchen. The light was off, and I did not get up to turn it on.
Until Day 378, I tried to stay off social media, tried to avoid the news. Few things made me happy then, but none of them lay in clickbait headlines and outraged reactions. Watching things get worse did not make me feel as if I could do any better. When I laid in bed those nights, I could hear little feet scrabbling from the tile to the laminate. I wondered where they were getting in.
When I found the droppings, I texted my landlord. He said he’d send a guy by. Didn’t tell me who or when or to do what, but that’s what he said, and I didn’t want to be a bother, so I stayed alone until Day 380.
“How are you?” Jenny asked me, her face blown up wide on my monitor, eyes not quite looking at mine. It was a line from a script; we all knew the answer, and I’m sure she could see it in the bags beneath my eyes, but I gave a weak smile and nodded, a gesture of appreciating the question and refusal to commit to a definitive reply.
“Not getting much sleep lately,” I said. “I think I’ve got mice.”
“Ew! Have you put out traps?”
“The landlord was supposed to send someone, but I’m still waiting. They haven’t gotten into anything, at least.”
“You sure it’s mice?”
“What else would they be?”
“I dunno, rats? Ricky’s brother had raccoons living in his roof, could be that too—”
I laughed. I almost wished for raccoons at that point. I needed the adrenaline.
“I’m sure it’s just mice. But I’ll keep you posted.”
Wish I could say we talked for hours, but she had places to be, and I had another many hours in the day to spend inside and alone, moving from my computer screen to my television screen to my phone screen and then squeezing my eyes tight in bed as I tried to flush the residual lights away into dreamland. I tried to read a book on occasion, but the silence around me filled my brain with false noise and summoned tiny voices that reminded me of the things I was trying to escape. I lay in bed too many nights too tired to sleep, too fixed on the silence in my room, drowning it out with angry thoughts and homing in on the slightest bit of noise that could be the mice.
I thought one was on me, one night.
I woke up to pinpricks on my chest, and when I rose, I felt a fleeting movement before I heard the retreating scrape of claws on laminate.
My landlord sent someone over the next morning, because I called him on the verge of vomiting in the middle of the night, not expecting him to answer but hoping that regurgitating my experience into his voicemail would stop me from regurgitating anything else. The guy showed up in a band shirt and jeans and smelled like an old carpet, definitely just a guy my landlord knew and not someone he’d have to pay in anything more than a six-pack.
He snuffled around the corners of my apartment, thankfully without minding the way I hovered behind him, eyeing what he poked and prodded. I didn’t like the look of puzzlement on his face, but he did set traps as he went.
“Well, I can’t tell you where they’re coming from, this place looks sealed up pretty tight,” he said. “But that should do it. They like to follow the walls when they run, so I’m sure you’ll get ‘em sooner or later.”
That wasn’t very reassuring, but I was also suddenly hyper aware of how silly I felt in needing reassurance. They were mice, not burglars. An ever-replenishing supply of cute little nuisances that only lived to eat, sleep, and make more of themselves. That’s all they were, little mice.
I heard a snap in the night, but found nothing in the traps. It took me a long time to even figure out which trap had gone off, and there was no evidence of any other disturbance around it. Could mousetraps misfire? I wasn’t sure how to reset it without snapping my own finger, so I let it be, hoping the half dozen others would succeed where its brethren failed.
About three nights later, I was awoken by the same violent crack. This time I was shocked to find it had worked. The mouse lay twitching under the bar. I couldn’t tell if it was still alive or just going through the motions of death. I could see my phone light reflecting in its black, bulging eyes, and wondered if this was the last thing it saw, a terrifying beam from the darkness. Going to the light was a comfort to humans, but perhaps it was a terror to creatures that spent so much of their time skulking around within the walls.
When I was sure there was no life left in it, I knelt down and had a look. Poor thing had been through the ringer—it looked sticky, worn somehow. It was almost misshapen, but I was sure that was the handiwork of the trap. I rummaged a plastic shopping bag from beneath the sink and scooped it up, trap and all, and quickly stuffed it in the trash. Maybe not the most dignified burial, but I didn’t want to brave the garbage bins at, what was it, three in the morning? Not on a chilly night like this, where my nerves were already alight. I would toss it once the sun was up, after I made myself go to sleep, and pushed aside all thoughts of bulging-eyed, twitching-legged mice gasping for air among the rotting scraps.
For a few days, it seemed like my problem was solved. And then, like most problems, it wasn’t.
That pinprick feeling of something running across my chest came back, accompanied by more than one set along the floor. More than once I awoke to traps snapping only to find nothing there. Every time I’d drift back to sleep, another set of feet would skitter by, bringing me back from the brink of unconsciousness into the harrowing darkness I was trying to escape. My boss became increasingly terse with my spacey gaze and slow work, and what could I say? I haven’t slept, sir, because of the mice—the mice did it, they keep me awake, the traps do nothing and I am haunted by mice and I am expected to sign in here every day as usual as if nothing is wrong, as if I haven’t lost track of how many days it’s been since this all began, as if I haven’t lost track of my friends and family and dreams of a world outside these walls, as if all concern for me has been only a concern for cost and production.
I didn’t say that. I slept on my breaks, because that was the only chance I got.
One night I heard them scratching and arose from my bed with fury. I was no longer afraid of feeling the squish of fur and bone beneath my feet as I trod the laminate in the dark. Tonight, I thought raggedly, I will find them. I checked every wall, every crease, for the hole. I could hear them moving beyond, but still couldn’t find that dark little portal. Meticulously, I moved through my apartment, pulling back furniture, tugging at the baseboards, trying to find my way in. At about four in the morning, I stood in my living room, looking around with eyes too wild for the bags beneath them, about to scream out my loss of hope, when I saw the wall move.
It was hard to tell, in the dim light of a single bulb, whether it was my furious insomnia or something real—until I saw it again. A light flex, like a vein pumping or a lung breathing. I pulled a painting off the wall to get a better look, to put my hand against it in the hope that I could trust my touch more than my sight, and I felt the throb as real as my own heart running feral in my chest. My finger traced the drywall, already cracked out of years of neglect—the reason I’d placed the painting there to begin with—and I picked at it. The seam opened easily, like peeling a fruit, or like a mortician peeling back the chest of a cadaver, hardly even registering the dust gathering beneath my nails. Once the hole was torn—and that dim bulb cast its eye inside—I collapsed onto the living room floor.
I found the mice. They were solid within the hole, piled against each other in crooked and violent ways. Their tails were tangled, claws entwined. It even seemed like their bodies were fused in places, as if they had been twisted together for so long their bodies had forgotten they were separate. Hundreds of eyes glinted out and hundreds of sharp-toothed snouts screamed as they were accosted by beams of light they may have never seen before.
Reek spilled from the hole, of decay and something I couldn’t place. They twisted as one, some pulling away from the light and others toward, their combined form unable to fully commit to any specific direction. I couldn’t tell how far they went into the wall, but they were all I could see in the hole I tore. They cried and gnashed and writhed as one, that’s all they were, little mice, who lived to eat and sleep and make more of themselves, inside the walls where the light couldn’t touch, in a bed of filth and decay and neglect.
Watching them twist and shriek, watching them gnash and move in waves of brown and grey that spilled drywall blood from the wounded wall, I sobbed, and it was with elation. I found the mice, the mice in the walls, torn and twisted within each other, a pulsing mass of flesh beneath a plain drywall surface. I cried because I saw them, and for once, felt I was understood.