This appears in a pre-2010 issue
of cc&d magazine.
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Some of us joke about pushing up daisies, others about starting a worm farm or becoming fish food. But our plans often pan out differently from what we expect, as Bobby Burns’s Scottish laddie notes o’ mice and men when his plow shatters another’s home and scatters that other’s possessions.
At 7:30 a.m. on the first Wednesday in May, Karl Gutmann’s twelve-year-old black Burmese cat, Cossette, brings a small brown field mouse to his front doormat and drops it.
So far as Karl knows from firsthand observation, this is her first kill of the year. In the past four years Cossette seems to have slowed down greatly and has not even attempted to catch birds—which once were her specialty. Indeed, she now ignores them as they hop around the front walk near her, eating birdseed that some of them spill down from the feeders hanging in front of his livingroom windows.
Karl lets Cossette come in for her breakfast and then goes out for the morning newspaper in his driveway. When he returns, he bends over and slides a small trowel under the mouse and tosses it lightly at the base of the front hedge.
For about five minutes Cossette eats, and Karl sips his first cup of coffee and pages though the news. Then, in her grating nasal Burmese voice that must be obeyed, Cossette says, “R-a-n-n-n-n-n,” indicating that she is done with her food—for now—and must return to the wilds of their northwest coast Long Island village.
Half an hour later, when Karl leaves the house to drive to work, he finds that Cossette has placed a second mouse on his doormat, the first one being fully visible beneath the front hedge at the edge of the walk. Without bending to get his trowel, Karl clumsily pushes the second mouse’s body off the mat with the side of his sandal, in the direction of the faucet that the hose is connected to.
And so the mouse matter rests until midway through Saturday morning when Karl is moved to do yard work.
With his trowel in one hand and his spade in the other, he recalls the first mouse which Cossette had brought home and which he had tossed under the hedge. It still lies near the edge of the walk and appears to be totally dried out. Its eyes are gone or sunken down beyond his line of sight, and two files of very tiny brown ants are near it, one approaching empty “handed,” the other leaving, apparently conveying small portions of mouse jerky for their commune.
Karl inspects the mouse a little closer. Its tiny yellowed teeth are visible, as are, beneath its fur, the contours of its little skull and even its little ribcage. Karl rubs the side of his unshaven jaw and recalls the mummified face of Ramses the Second, seen scores of times in scores of books that all reprint the same grisly photograph.
He decides not to disturb this natural process and spends the next half hour doing some planting. Then, as a matter of course, it is time to water his new evergreen bushes and irises. And, of course, Karl has a second close encounter with basic matters.
The second mouse lies exactly where he had pushed it with his foot three days before. Unlike its fellow, four feet to the northeast, this mouse appears to be very active—almost lively—with its abdomen violently twitching and heaving around, although its head and legs, Karl notices, are comparatively still. Bending closer, he notices further that this mouse is quite damp.
Even though the outdoor faucet had been turned off, it has been dripping slightly where the hose is fastened, and the walk and dozens of tiny piles of crushed brown locust leaves and spruce needles near it are also damp in an irregular eighteen-inch-wide semicircle.
Could this mouse have survived, paralyzed perhaps by Cossette’s bite to its neck? Should it be put out of its misery with his spade—as he has done to various rabbits, snakes, mice, rats, and birds she had caught and crippled in the past decade?
Again he bends closer to inspect the situation.
With his trowel, he gently pokes the mouse.
Its belly opens up—and dozens, scores, hundreds of tiny maggots spills out and writhe around on the damp walk.
Yes, there is life inside this mouse. Just not what he has expected, despite eighty-two years of experience—or one year of experience, eighty-two times. And—in hindsight—it makes sense. Turn, turn.
Straightening up, Karl feels a momentary heaviness inside his forehead—then, smiling, he echoes the narrator at the close of Ring Lardner’s short story Haircut: “Koan it out—wet or dry?”
