Little White Seas
The mice were a test. They were also a two-for-one special at Gary's Reptile Shop on the corner of 4th and Vine. Rufus caught the handwritten sale sign out of the corner of his eye, and the idea came to him while idling at a nearby stoplight. He made sure the two mice, both white, were of different sexes, charged the $3.99 to his AmEx card, which he was surprised Gary accepted, and drove quickly, back to the starter home he and Cheryl had purchased twelve years ago and forgot to move out of.
The sun had long set, as it was winter and he was late leaving work, allowing Rufus to avoid detection while he slipped into the kitchen. He set the thin cardboard box in the cabinet with the breakfast bowls and slowly tilted it upward, letting gravity pull the mice onto the dishes. He shut the cabinet door, careful not to let it slam, and discarded the box in the garage, thinking it a less likely place for Cheryl to notice and ask questions.
All Rufus wanted was to see how Cheryl would react. He wanted, in particular, to see if she would kill the mice, but he would have settled for her doing anything at all.
Each morning, Rufus wakes first. He brushes his teeth, takes a Vitamin B12 supplement—a new addition to his routine now that Cheryl converted them to a vegan diet—and heads to the kitchen to prepare breakfast. Except this time, he waits. Like a cat in the early morning hours, he hopes to incite a reaction, for her to move groggily into the kitchen, unsuspecting, and shriek when she sees what he’s done, as they do in the cartoons.
Instead, Cheryl swooshes down the stairs like a track star setting a record, pulls a bowl from the cabinet, tosses tiny fragments of mouse shit into the sink, rinses, dumps in the cereal, and pours the milk. For a moment, as she slurps down chunks of Cheerios, they lock eyes, and Rufus expects to feel himself in her gaze. But it’s as if he’s entirely absent and she’s staring only at the wall behind him. He wonders, or hopes, or convinces himself, that if she’s able to look at him but still not see him, perhaps she didn’t see the mouse shit, either.
When she finishes the cereal, she sets the bowl in the sink, collects her purse, and leaves for work. Neither she nor Rufus say a word.
In the afternoon, Rufus leaves work early to visit the local hardware store. He buys a package of one dozen traditional mousetraps, two of the newer models (the ones that kill the mouse in a little hut so you don’t have to see it), as well as a 16 oz. bottle of rodent repellent spray that he hadn’t intended to purchase but the cashier assured him worked like a charm, which seemed, to him, a trustworthy claim. On the way home, he decides to take Woodland Parkway instead of the highway, lengthening his drive by nearly twenty minutes, because the city recently replanted a set of trees and other foliage in the median, and he wanted to see them. As he turns onto the parkway, he rolls down the window. He is impressed. He considers asking Cheryl to come out with him to see the new arrangement but immediately thinks better of it.
At home, Rufus places the repellent spray under the sink with each of the other cleaners, logo facing out, as if a kind of product placement in a television show no one wanted to produce. He sets the mousetraps off to the side and waits, again, for Cheryl to notice. After dinner that evening, she reaches under the sink for the detergent to start the dishwasher but doesn’t find it in its usual place. She bends down, looks past the mousetraps and the rodent repellent, and flips through each bottle, searching for the detergent until she finds it in the back, where Rufus had hidden it that afternoon.
Eventually, the mice breed. It seems too soon, too unlikely for the pair of mice Rufus had bought just last week to have already reproduced, but sure enough, a tiny little mouse scurries by Rufus’s feet as he walks out of the bathroom. Feeling badly for the baby mouse, whose death Rufus hopes Cheryl will soon bring, Rufus takes another afternoon off work to buy a package of mouse food. He considers buying a cage (he’s not sure where else, exactly, to dump the food) but doesn’t want to give Cheryl any more reason to delay the inevitable. And between the cost of the original mice and his impromptu hardware store purchase, he’d already spent $38.89 on this experiment, so he decides against it.
When he returns home, he finds yet another baby mouse.
On Sundays, Cheryl typically spends the morning reading. Like church, this lasts several hours. And this particular Sunday, despite all that had changed around her, is no different. She tends to finish a book in two of these sessions—so she reads about 26 books a year—because she is smart and driven and unrelenting in her pursuits, which is exactly what Rufus found attractive about her nearly two decades ago and what leaves him unable to understand her unwillingness to act, her reluctance to kill the mice.
As Rufus sits in their breakfast nook, watching her over the tip of the Sunday paper, he sees one of the baby mice hop onto the coffee table and begin chewing through her bookmark. Turning a page, Cheryl notices Rufus’s stare. He tilts his head down toward the table, begging her to look. She obliges, and her eyes settle on the mouse, nibbling away at the corner, then return to her book, leaving the mouse alone. Rufus can’t believe what he’s seeing. Had it been just any piece of cheap, replaceable cardboard, he may have understood, but this bookmark was given to Cheryl by her late mother as a souvenir from her trip to Paraguay, and she had used it (quite religiously) ever since. Now, it lay in tiny, circular pieces, as if it’d been randomly and repeatedly hole punched. But, still, Cheryl does not say a word.
When she leaves for her afternoon jog, Rufus throws away the mousetraps.
The following morning, as usual, Rufus wakes first. He wipes his eyes and sees baby mice everywhere, in each of the corners, on shelves, napping on the tube of toothpaste in the bathroom. There are even a few in his sock drawer. Later, when Cheryl finally joins him for breakfast in the kitchen, there’s a mouse in her hair. It strikes Rufus as incredibly odd that she doesn’t feel it. After she rounds the corner of the island and catches his eye, he points to her head. Confused, she slowly brings a hand to her scalp, feels the mouse, and gently removes it, setting it on the ground to let run away. She takes a banana from the fruit basket on the dining room table, collects her purse, and leaves for work.
Watching her go, Rufus notices that the mice have begun chewing through the living room carpet where it meets the tile floor of the foyer. He kneels down and runs his hand along its recently raised seam. He remembers when he and Cheryl picked out this carpet because she insisted on assessing each sample with the following question: “Can you see us with this color?”
He takes the day off work to return to the hardware store and fix the floor.
That night, they go out for dinner, at Rufus’s request, to a little restaurant downtown they’d never tried before, that they’d driven by several times but never noticed. It feels nice, Rufus thinks, to not have to swat mice away from his plate as he eats, to not have to discard so many boxes of food the mice had torn through. He wonders if Cheryl feels the same way, but it’s difficult to tell, and he doesn’t ask.
Although he’d initially resisted Cheryl’s pivot to veganism, he orders the cauliflower and pear soup instead of the chicken parmesan he’d have chosen otherwise. After their food arrives, he thinks he sees Cheryl smile, perhaps noticing his effort to enjoy the diet she’d pushed on him for months before he finally relented. But when he looks all the way up, she starts picking a piece of spinach out of her teeth, then returns, without ever meeting his gaze, to her veggie sandwich.
Instead of waiting until Sunday morning, Cheryl spends that evening in bed reading To Kill a Mockingbird. After brushing his teeth, Rufus lifts the covers off his side and finds a puddle of mice nestled together, sleeping in his place. He looks up at Cheryl, hoping she’ll say something, ask him to snuggle up on her side, or better yet, dig the mousetraps out of the garbage and finally get on with it. But she says nothing, and Rufus notices that in place of her now-chewed-up bookmark, she’s using his receipt from Gary’s Reptile Shop to mark her page.
Rufus carefully slides the bottom pillow out from under the mice, leaves the room, and sleeps in the guest bedroom across the hall.
This time, Rufus does not wake first. He’s woken by the sound of wood cracking, a few sudden snaps, followed by a loud crash. He hops out of bed and rushes to the landing at the top of the stairs. There’s a hole in the attic floor from where the ceiling fan used to hang, which is now in pieces on the living room carpet, and a hole in the roof directly above it. Snow falls into the living room, and Rufus is quite cold. The mice, thousands of them now, are eating their home.
Cheryl has already packed her suitcase. She rolls it across the floor and up to Rufus.
“I’m leaving,” she says.
She descends the staircase, and when she exits through the front door, she is followed by the two mice from Gary’s Reptile Shop (it’s impossible, of course, for Rufus to know this, since the mice all look the same, but he’s certain of it nonetheless). Thinking they may collapse at any moment, Rufus sets his feet carefully on every step, whereas Cheryl had strutted straight down them. He looks around at his home being gutted and torn apart. He sees nothing except a sea of white.
Turning his head, Rufus spots the long oak box that houses his grandfather’s old hunting rifle, peeking out from the hole in the ceiling, where it’s sat in the attic for over a decade. He imagines clicking open the latches and taking that gun, which had been used to kill several kinds of animals when his family still owned their farm in South Dakota, before the flood in ‘72 swept it away, and blowing a hole in every mouse, then in every wall, and through every door, shattering every window in the house, so that when Cheryl looks past him, there will be nothing left to see, and she’ll finally notice him.
Instead, Rufus watches the mice stop gnawing, scurry to the front door, and follow Cheryl out onto the street, her suitcase rolling behind her. She walks into the cool, gray air, and eventually, the other mice do, too. As they exit, the snow falls harder until one sea of white replaces the other. Minutes later, there is an email. It says management has observed, in recent weeks, Rufus having taken a number of last-minute “personal days.” Too many, in fact.
He has been fired.
