The Book of Ten

Custody

 Custody n the dog dragged it out from under the refrigerator, the dead mouse, a perfect specimen of a mouse, so like a cartoon mouse it didn’t seem real, like Jerry who made life miserable for tom the Cat on Saturday morning tv, this one so recently dead it wasn’t even stiff, making my dog miserable too, because it wouldn’t move when he nudged it with his cold nose, because i had to tie him up before i could scoop it up and carry it outside to the trash bin. the next day when i went back to look i found it gone, simply vanished as if it had never been. had some predator carried it off or had its brothers come to bear it away for a proper mouse funeral, one acting the priest, one the gravedigger? Maybe it hadn’t been dead at all, just playing possum—playing dead mouse?—and had simply risen up and scampered away. Somehow i wanted that to be the case despite its filth, the dirt and droppings, the harm it can do in a house, the way a whole continent once wanted Jesse James to be still alive, disguised as some poor farmer in the West, or d. b. Cooper to survive jumping from the plane, the way we sometimes can’t help rooting for the murderer on tv to outwit the smart cop after all, want our baser natures to triumph just this once. but today there was another mouse, this one sitting still in the middle of the kitchen floor, and because by now i was tired of mice, i went after it with the broom, though i could see it was dying already, had probably eaten poison under the house, and though it wanted to live still, like every living thing, its tiny feet scrabbling to stay upright, i swept it out onto the deck and down onto the ground below, where it lay still, dead then or soon to be.  “Custody of the eyes,” the Polish nuns called it years ago when my friend entered the convent, thirteen, a child. they meant by that to cover oneself in a wimple of reflection, looking only inward on the spirit, eyes downcast on the stone floor, never seeing the others who passed in the hall those long, silent days. She left when she came to believe there was more to see, the body itself, for example, body of the lover spread open on the sunlit sheets, bodies of the dead spilling their secrets in the anatomy lab—this was the world she chose. Still, it’s custody of that inner eye, the one looking inward on the spirit, i find myself thinking of, the one that sees me for what i am: someone who wanted one mouse to live and the other to die, wanted it for no good reason except that i did, the killer who wielded the broom like a golf club just because i could, who smacked the little dying body and sent it flying to land splat! like a cartoon mouse on the hard ground, someone who now leans heavily on the broomstick, a little breathless with my power, gloating even, in the unseasonably warm october air. ...