In my apartment, I’m Mousekiller. This is what it means to grow older. Not doing my own laundry. Not cooking my own food. Not paying my own rent. Killing my own Mice. The rest are just accessories to the Mousekiller condition.
The Mousekiller condition? It’s easier to explain what it’s not. It’s not Bloodhungry, for example, not like you might think. But then it’s also not reluctant. It’s not prideful, but neither is it shameful. It’s not all-consuming, and it’s not strenuous.
It does not permit paid vacation. No time off for good behavior.
Most Mousekillers inherit the role, an ambitious few rise to claim it, some never find it at all. When I was younger the title fell, depending, to either Ivy the Snake or to my father, a kind and gentle man who closed his eyes while he dropped feeder mice into Ivy’s tank by their tails. In the colder months, the title fell also to my mother who laid and emptied the Mousetraps in the kitchen cupboard. All accepted this responsibility with civility, and satisfaction at a job well done, and all so that no one else might have to. Though it was always my own pet snake, and always my mess in the kitchen, it was never my Mouse to Kill. I hope to believe I inherited this grace with the Mousekiller Crown.
Mouse ran across my kitchen floor. Well, more like slid; the apartment’s on an incline. Mouse slid across my kitchen floor and over my toes while I was frying onions and I did not scream but my blood turned to ice in my veins. Mouse peered at me from behind the garbage can, and I peered back. It was the first time I’d seen it, though in truth I had known it was there. I had heard it moving behind the oven.I imagined it living its little life, feasting nightly on the forgotten crumbs of my own dinner. But if hearing is believing, then seeing is knowing for sure, and I wept for Mouse’s misstep.
My roommates and I set out to reclaim our kitchen floor: if the backswing of the executioner’s ax made a noise, it would sound like the click! of a Mousetrap. And it was one day more before I woke to the sound of a snap!, a small struggle, a silence. Mouse was caught by the neck. I looked down at its broken body and contemplated waking a roommate, but Mouse Disposal isn’t a two-person job. To wake her would be cruel, selfish. Merely a way to make her complicit, to not shoulder the guilt alone.
I let my eyes fall out of focus as I considered my options. Vision fuzzed, I could pretend not to notice the way Mouse’s peppercorn eyes bulged out of its skull and its blood, bright red like jam, pooled from its mouth onto the peanut butter we’d used to tempt fate. A morbid PB&J. No, a fatal one.
This was my coming of age.
I held my breath. I strapped on my boots and my gardening gloves and I used our broom to push the trap, Mouse attached, into the dustpan that I emptied into three layers of plastic bags, which I tied with a finality that hurt me. I took Mouse out with the trash to the alley dumpster and whispered my apology as I shut the lid.
Thus I became Mousekiller, and with the title came pride in my own capability but also a sense of grief I could neither name nor explain besides to say that it was enormous. When my roommate made her way down the stairs and into the kitchen an hour later, I was already reading with my morning coffee. “I took care of it,” I told her. “It was no problem.”
The next week, I heard a squeak! while I was scrambling eggs for breakfast.
And this is the part no one tells you. Mice haunt you. They replace each other one by one in a guilt-tripping relay until, eventually, the guilt fades. I killed another Mouse. And another after that. And still another and another. It seemed I killed a Mouse a month, or more. Snap! Struggle, Silence. Snap! Silence. Snap! Silence. Snap! Struggle, Silence. And so on. It was the backing track to my newfound adulthood as if my self-sufficiency came with a theme song, free of charge.
There are more Mousekiller duties, ones that aren’t about Killing Mice. I try to take these in stride. I pay my taxes and prep my meals. I keep my appointments, and I am not late. I change the filter in the furnace and dust the tops of my ceiling fans with the dull wonderment that these things have always existed, and that I should be so able. And still, in the midst of these moments of “making it,” so to speak, comes a squeak, and then that whispered melody—snap! struggle, silence—to remind me that I have blood on my hands:
Mouseblood.
And it’s dried on the floor in the kitchen too.
And it’s stuck to the bristles on the broom in the closet.
And it’s decaying in the dumpster in the alley behind the train tracks.
And it’s coursing through the tiny body of a new Mouse, already hidden behind the stove.
Audrey Champelli is a senior at DePaul University studying Journalism, Arabic, and Environmental Science. Mostly creative nonfiction, her previous work has covered everything from fanfiction to lesbian pulp fiction to Dolly Parton’s legacy in Appalachia. Her writing has appeared in 14 East Magazine, Crook & Folly, and Creating Knowledge. She loves cooking, reading, and the Montrose Point Bird Sanctuary.