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.

WISH I WAS A HEADLIGHT ON SOME WESTERN TRAIN

READING NEXT WEEK

This is a nonfiction reading I'm curating at STOREFRONT'S Literary Thursday next week! Four graduate students (three nonfiction writers and one social worker) will sweetly read aloud to you.




THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 4TH AT 7:30 PM

Tim Gomez
(an MFA student in creative nonfiction at Sarah Lawrence, staff writer for Cinemablend.com, taco lover)

Stacey Kahn
(MFA student in creative nonfiction at Sarah Lawrence, assistant editor of nonfiction at Epiphany literary journal, license plate tallyer)

Kathleen McIntyre
(social groupwork student at Hunter, editor of The Worst zine, an absolute phoenix)

Cynthia Ann Schemmer
(MFA student in creative nonfiction at Sarah Lawrence, Habits of Being zine, biggest sweet tooth around.)


* STOREFONT is located at 16 Wilson Avenue, Brooklyn. *

BLACK & RED EYE

Lauren over at Black & Red Eye has been producing some new and completely rad work lately (of things other than me giving sassbrows), and you should go check it out!

LETTING SUCH THINGS HAPPEN

Mindy jumped off the balcony that summer. She flew three stories to the parking lot below and laid herself out like a cherry pie smashed on the blacktop. I watched from above as my boss peeled her warm fuzzy body off the ground, my eyes like two Red Hots. We would have to build a higher fence. We would have to call her owners. We would have to say, “Your dog is dead,” but we would not say, “We train dogs with behavioral issues, not self-esteem issues.”

In weeks to come, Linda, the owner of the boarding and training business she ran out of her Sunset Park apartment, would also lose Willy, the Weimaraner, on the Upper East Side; he would bolt out of the back of her mini van and up Third Avenue. She would try to step on his black dragging leash, but would instead trip and fall to the pavement. “Somebody grab him! Please! Grab that dog!” she would yell. I would make colorful flyers showing Willy with his big gray elephant ears that would read, “HAVE YOU SEEN THIS DOG?” But no one called.

I decided I did not want to work with someone who, although relatively well-known in dog training, was capable of letting such things happen. Linda’s apartment was small and ill-equipped: the dog facilities were larger than her actual living quarters, the two spaces often colliding. There would be dog hair in the dinner bowls and coffee mugs, urine on the floor of the bedroom, and old dog food bags filled with granola for breakfast.

Linda was built like a bulldog: shoulders thick, jowls swinging and stubborn as hell. She expected me to clean up after her, like wash her crusty dishes that mingled with dog bowls in the sink and launder her menstrual covered bed sheets. I ignored these requests daily and told myself I would quit when I had acquired enough of my own dog walking clients in Manhattan and rid myself of the unrelenting days of putting up with her miserable Ibizan hounds. There were three of them, a gangly gang with impossibly long legs and ears like fennec foxes. They would taunt the smaller dogs and try to bite me as I shooed them into their crates. Linda barely lifted a finger while I was there. She mostly sat in front of the computer brushing her long black hair and managing to get more mashed potatoes on the keyboard than in her spitty mouth.

The day finally came when I had no choice but to quit when I saw Linda’s breasts. I refer to this moment at the “boob pop,” a defining moment in my self-respect through someone else’s humility. I had been out on the balcony hosing away the dog shit, the smell of bleach stinging all the openings of my face, when I had started to cry. My mother had only died two months before, and since I worked six days a week, I had little time to see my family. I dropped the running hose and went to find Linda. She was inside, sitting at her computer, in nothing but a lavender terrycloth robe and her wet hair making curlicues on the sides of her face. When she saw me crying she invited me into her bedroom where she sprawled her large body across the bed with one of her hounds on top of her, with his body between her legs and his head on her stomach. She rubbed the dog’s belly as she told me she knew about the death, but she was waiting for me to come to her. I asked for some time off, thinking there was no way she could deny me grieving time. Unfortunately, she told me, things would be way too busy in the upcoming weeks to allow me any time off. She would say this to me completely deadpan while I stood before her, smelling like bleach and dog shit, and could feel myself about to lose control. That was until the dog abruptly leapt off the bed, flinging Linda’s robe open to expose her two gigantic breasts like a second set of merciless eyes between us. I stared at them, and then at her, and let out a laugh that I could only imagine resonated with her for weeks to come.

I quit then and there, and a few weeks later I would hear that she let another dog turn into pie.

OH, ALRIGHT.

THE LONG CUT