3 blind mice

DID YOU EVER SEE
 
The beautiful boy who lives in my cabin has the dark unprotected eyes of a wild animal. I find him crouching by the woods road, almost naked, slingshot tensed on an unwary grouse. He tries to hide the slingshot when he sees me. He mumbles that he didn't have permission. Can he have permission. 

By my cabin his cat comes to rub against my legs. The tortoiseshell has one ghost eye which glares like the washed out blank eye of a greek statue. The boy has left water by the door in one of my china plates. Inside, a slough of mud caked clothes is piled in a corner. Every lantern is broken; the mantles crumbled, the chimneys cracked or gone. A stack of books has toppled and been left with split spines and crushed open pages. The battery in the flashlight is a gob of rust.  

The porch he was supposed to build as rent is an outline -- four posts, three sills. I leave a note telling him that if he makes the bed tightly the mice won't nest in the quilts. I straighten the books, then put them back. To stack them would be to comment. Not my home now, I tell myself.    

The second time, I come to spend the night. I have warned him. The cat's not around. The boy has left a note saying he's going under. He hasn't been able to work. The clams are scant. The world is crushing him. He leaves me his breathing apparatus in place of the unfinished rent. 

The bed is made. I straighten the books, folding the pages smooth. When I open the desk drawer to find a pencil to write a reply, an enormous mouse with white eyes raises its head from a toilet paper nest and turns its nose uncertainly from side to side. Blind. One blind mouse. In its dark world it waits for my hidden immensity to move, for the pressure of my presence to stir a hint of my intent. 

I write the boy a note saying I remember nineteen. I understand. He may stay or go, do nothing, as he wishes. I will still respect him. I say I don't need his diving gear. I already have too many tools I don't use.   

I want to promise that it will get better but I know it doesn't. All that will happen is that after a while we get used to the intolerable. After a while even the intolerable becomes our condition, comfortable. Only the eye, which sees, offends. The seeing is his to control.   

If I can't promise a better world, only that he will survive his knowledge of it, should I offer that as if it were reassurance? He would see through that comfort to its threat. I leave a note which says less than I want to say because more would be cruel. He needs kindness more than truth. What he needs most is his own place to barricade himself from truth. 

The blind mouse is still there. Three blind mice, see how they run, memory jingles. What does that mean? Nonsense words. I never saw a blind mouse before. It must be old. What does the nursery rhyme mean? Before Dick Whittington, when people had no cats to catch the old ones, were blind mice tame? How could I save that rhyme all my life as if it said something? A habit of believing that words strung together make phrases, that phrases all mean something. It will be right. I remember being your age. Three blind mice. See how they run. See how they run.   

I go to the cabin one more time before leaving. The books are as I left them. The boy's clothes are plastered along the new sills like snake sheds left to dry. Sprouts are molding in the sprouter. The diving gear is gone. My note on the back of his note is folded on the table. I open the drawer where the mouse was.   

A handful of half sized mice with dark eye-beads fall away from the blind one like dropping petals. Her sides have collapsed. She waves her head slowly, trying to guess where I am before she moves. The small mice run back and forth. One drops onto the floor. They don't act scared. She is blind and has not taught them how to be startled by things they see. They have to find the instinct for fear themselves and learn how to obey it.    

I leave the boy a note saying he should put D-Con in the drawer with the mice. They will damage the quilts and books.   

I hope he already knows the mice are there. I hope he has opened the drawer and discovered the blind mouse. Maybe he shared his food with her, like a prisoner in solitary. He might have seen the babies at each stage: first pink as shrimp, then purpling over with a haze of fur before they turned neat grey. 

Maybe they don't run because he watches over them. The cat was blind. The boy may have fed the mice. If the cat is gone now because he knows that even a blind cat could catch a blind mouse, he will protect them. He will ignore the note.   

I hope he ignores the note.

-- 
Kala
@wildgardiner.me  @beautifuldreamers.us