BAD TASTE: MUSEE MECANIQUE

WHAT WILL YOU MISS MOST WHEN YOU DO OR DON'T DIE (excerpt)

It is midnight and I am stuck with a mouse, who we evicted from our oven. She is small, the size of a cotton ball, and she sticks her little pink pencil eraser nose, covered in peanut butter, out of the grates of the Havahart trap to get a better look at me. “Hello, tiny,” I whisper, and she hops backwards. Jocelyn and Kate, my roommates, come in for a look. The mouse is dancing in the peanut butter and pasty parmesan bait we lured her with. When Jocelyn asks what we do now, I tell her we let the mouse out onto the streets of Brooklyn. This idea makes us cringe, but it’s better than waking up to something dead, or even worse: something only half dead.

I walk her to the creek that separates Brooklyn from Long Island City. I open the doors of the trap, but she doesn’t move. Stockholm Syndrome, I think. The Patti Hearst of rodents. I tip the trap so she tumbles out; she pauses, sniffs the ground, and scurries away. My roommates and I agreed that this is the best and most humane resolution. At least this is what I keep telling myself as I tighten the scarf around my neck and walk back to my apartment. Autumn in Brooklyn is a relief. Where our bodies once baked in the heat of a third floor walk up with only a broken oscillating fan that made sounds like a neck snapping, we now bake acorn squash and pies. Last week I put a blueberry pie in the oven with mitted hands, the 350 degrees turning my eyes to lumps of charcoal. What if the mouse is in there, Jocelyn had asked me. Well, then we’ll be having blueberry mousse instead, I replied. She didn’t get it. These are the types of jokes I make: plays on words that sound better in print. They often go over horribly, misunderstood, and I am alone. Because of course, we did not have a moose living in our oven. The joke is the missing letter ‘s’. The real joke is I am always missing something.