Somehow, one day a mousetrap is wedged in the space between the cushion and the arm of my favorite TV-viewing armchair. My dad has been sitting in the chair that day sewing bacon onto the mousetraps and one trap has gone astray. He sews the bacon on because the mice are very delicate, very crafty, and if you just wedge the bacon on they will steal it without triggering the clapper arm which crushes them. We live on the edge of a field and so there are mice like crazy. There are so many traps scattered throughout the house, what seems like hundreds of traps. One must be aggressive, in such situations. There is one season when dad traps twenty-three mice in a week. He’s very proud of his ability to trap and discard many field mice. Every time he gets one he comes through the room where I’m watching TV and dangles it between me and the TV. It’s hard to come between me and the TV. We are at one.
I stick my knee down between the arm and the cushion, because why? Because I sort of kneel the whole time I am watching TV. And sometimes I spring or leap onto the back of something. The back of the armchair, or the back of a sofa. I imagine everything is a staircase that leads to an attic where there are old-timey things. I perch ready to climb up to the attic loft where our quilted counterpanes are laid out on our little beds, and there is a bath in a metal tub, and a pan of snow with caramel taffy cooling in it, and it is the attic of a tree, because at this time, I am interested in these books where well-dressed mice live in very fancy homes inside the trunks of trees, and the littlest mice dress in overalls and tea dresses and their rooms are at the very top of the tree, in the attic of the tree, and they are tucked into beds with fluffy, multicolored quilts. I am desperate to have an attic, but we live in a ranch-style. Everyone I know lives in a ranch-style. I have only one friend with stairs—she is my fanciest friend. She and her sister share rooms in what was once an attic, but which has been renovated with carpet and a small bathroom and Strawberry Shortcake wallpaper. It is my idea of paradise. I don’t even know if I like the girl, I just want to go to her sleepovers because she has a stair and an attic. (Do you like our house? her mother asks me. I like it. Dennis Weaver’s wife grew up in this house, she says. He’s so handsome, I say. Yes, she says, and sighs.)
I perch in my chair, at one with the TV, ready to scale the arm of the chair toward the back of the sofa toward my imagined attic which is what: a space of air above the furniture, a space that leans against the wood paneling. The whole house is paneled. It sucks up light, even the light of the television. I perch, I crouch, I wedge my knee between the cushions and slice myself on the trap. My dad is pretty sorry for this later, he is pretty sorry for having left out a dangerous mouse-killing device in the space where I play.