It became difficult for the children to take him seriously anymore the day their father became a field mouse. Threats of groundings, corporal punishment, and the like just didn’t seem to hold when he said it from 2 inches off the ground while twitching his nose.
Samuel had awoken on a Sunday to the sound of his wife, Betunia, making waffles. While normally a soothing sound, that reminder of the slow paces in life and veritable pleasures that awaited a week worked hard, this morning every atom in his body longed to flee. Opening his eyes, he found the pillows as large as queen size beds, the bed a seemingly endless sea of wrinkled sheets and tossed duvet. He was, to say the least, confused and in nervousness, littered the bed with little pebbles of stool.
The first problem he faced was how to get down from the bed. This was easily accomplished he found by digging his claws into the loopholes of the duvet fabric and spelunking down the side of the bed, leaping off and landing squarely on his four paws. The carpet fibers were filthy and human hairs wedged into the Berber loops hung like nooses, awaiting his entrapment. Weaving through streaked underwear and rolled up socks, the smell of human filth was everywhere. He wondered how it was that they could become so accustomed to the pestilence of dirtied clothes, unwashed pits, sordid counter tops and stained toilet rims. The disarray of their existence seen from inches off the ground revealed a squalor he had never imagined existed: the nail clippings, droplets of lotion, lipstick caps and adventurous chap-stick, endless forests of orphaned hairs, the negative pregnancy tests lodged between the nightstand and the wall, their daughter’s picture, torn and worn at the edges. Memories sprung forth from the lower recesses of their home like nightshade and he imagined them floating upon past times every morning they had placed their feet upon the ground, crunching the hairs, displacing the chap-stick, massaging the lotion deeper and deeper into the carpet.
The door rises like a 40-story skyscraper and Samuel clamours to his back feet, front paws curled and held tightly against his chest and lifts up his neck staring at the door knob, symbolic of the impossible feat before him. He looks down to the base, sees the gap that he had never noticed before and suddenly, as if driven by the invisible force of habit, he is running towards the door, sliding sideways, and squeezing his body through the gap, driving his claws against the wooden floors again and again until he is through.
Bethunia is standing in the kitchen in front of him now, towering over him in his current form just as she had towered over him as a man, a boyfriend, a husband, and later, a father to her children. He wants to yell out to her, beg for her help, have her fix this mishap as she had fixed all the others: the wrecked car after a night of drinking, the money lost on pursuits of grandeur through craps and poker, the lost jobs and times he had forgotten to pick up the kids from school. Her posture is that of strength and confidence: chin held high, chest outright, head back, spine perfectly aligned. She whips the batter, spoons it out in perfect proportions with the large wooden spoons they had gotten from her mother for their wedding, and patiently waits for the light to turn green on the waffle maker. She is giant to him now and he wonders where this longing to have the situation fixed comes from, as if nostalgic for a time when things were pleasantly whole, a time that never was nor ever would be. She lifts her chin higher suddenly as if sensing his presence and turns her head, meeting the eyes of a disheveled, panting mouse near the bedroom doorway and slowly approaches, wielding the wooden spoon in her right hand.
