The Blurry Years. Eleanor Kriseman
to no one. I was doing pigtail braids in the mirror, even though we were already late for school.
My mom was at the counter, making a sandwich for my lunch. “Fuck,” she said. “They got into the bread.” She held up the bag so I could see from my spot in front of the mirror. There was a big hole in the side, and teeth marks had stretched and spotted the logo. She wrapped turkey slices around cheese slices instead, and poked them with toothpicks to make them stay.
That night we stayed up until dawn, waiting to catch them in the act. “Sit real still,” my mom said. “I want to know what we’re dealing with.” She was pretending like there were maybe just a couple of them, but I was guessing more. We heard them but we still didn’t see them and we fell asleep slumped against the wall. In the morning our backs were aching and there was cereal spilling from a hole in the bottom of the box of Fruity O’s. I scooped a handful off the top before I threw the rest away. “Keep everything in the fridge from now on,” my mom said.
I walked home through the alleys like I did when I wanted to find things. I was good at finding things. My mom called me the treasure queen. Every day on my way home from school I found things. That was how we had the tape deck and the guitar case with the smooth velvet insides that I couldn’t help stroking every time I opened it. I found heavier things too but I couldn’t take them home by myself.
This time I was looking to build some traps, or maybe some weapons. I pulled at some old pots that were fine except for the enamel was scraped off the insides. I found some rope and a bungee cord that was maybe not garbage, holding two trashcans together, but I thought we probably needed it more. I picked up sticks to test them—good sticks were hard to find, the ones that were straight and thin enough to bend but thick enough not to break, but I found them.
When I got home, my mom’s friend Bruce was there. Sometimes he brought me treats, like colored pencils or packs of Juicy Fruit, so I liked him. Bruce was bent over, looking at the place where the walls met the floor. “I think this is where they’re coming out,” he said. My mom was leaning over too, and she had her hand on his back. I dumped my treasures on the floor, and the pots clanged as they fell. “I’m building traps,” I said. “Or maybe weapons. I haven’t decided yet.”
Bruce smiled. “I think I can take care of this,” he said. I sat in the far corner with the knives and the toolkit and some duct tape while Bruce finished plugging up the hole in the wall. “That should do it,” he said. “They’ll go out the way they came in; they’re too smart to die in there.” He gave my mom a long kiss on the mouth and told her to call him if she needed to. I could hear him clomping down the stairs in his work boots. I was deciding what to use as bait. I decided on cereal because they’d eaten it before.
My mom didn’t say anything when I set up the traps on the kitchen counter that evening, but when she saw what I was taking to bed with us, she said, “No way. You’ll kill us all with those—what are those things? Were those the kitchen knives?” I was proud of my weapon. I waved it around like a wand. In the end she said I could keep it as long as I put it on the floor instead of under my pillow. We hadn’t washed the sheets yet and my face was resting on the stain from my pasta. It was too dark to see but I could still smell it, salty and oily.
Soon we could hear them, scrabbling and squeaking. We stayed still. We heard tiny scratches coming from inside the oven and the cabinets on the other side of the curtain. Then a pot clattered on the counter and I jumped up, grabbing my weapon from the side of the bed. My mom sat up, half-asleep. “What is going on?” she asked. I darted over to the counter and she followed me.
They were shimmering in the colored glow from the traffic lights on the corner, silver and sleek, changing hues as the light switched from yellow to red to green and back again. One was on the counter. Another one peeked out from behind the oven. A little one was catching drips from the faucet in the sink. Their eyes were dots of black paint; their whiskers were fishing line. I wanted to rub their ears but I was frozen, knife raised high in the air. They were shivering. I moved closer, just to look, and they scattered, disappearing into the darkness. My mom put her hands on my shoulders. “I’ll call Bruce again in the morning,” she said, and led me back to bed.
When I got home from school the next day, the apartment was covered in glue traps. My mom’s eyes were bright and darting. Her cheeks were flushed, a perfect pink. She was beautiful. “It’s not going to be pretty, these next couple of days,” she said. “But we’re going to win this battle.” I didn’t really want to win anymore. I’d untaped my weapon, put the knives back in the kitchen drawer. It was something about how little they were, and how soft their fur had looked. And how they were maybe one big family, lots of little brothers and sisters and one mom who was taking care of them all and when I thought about it that way maybe we could share our cereal with them as long as they were a little bit quieter at night when we were trying to sleep. But I didn’t say any of that to my mom because once she had that look in her eyes she was past listening. So we left the glue traps out and ate some pasta and went to sleep.
Little squeals woke us at dawn. A baby mouse had gotten a front paw stuck on a trap, and a bigger one was gnawing on its leg. It was trying to help the baby, trying to make it free, but the baby didn’t know that and it must have hurt like crazy, worse than the time my mom got mad and slammed my hand in the door and it swelled up and turned purple. We didn’t know what to do so we just watched. My mom had her hand over her mouth. I wanted to cry but I couldn’t. The bigger one finally snapped the bone with its teeth and the baby screamed and it sounded more like a tiny human scream than any noise an animal should make. Then the bigger one dragged the baby by the fur on its neck into the hole that Bruce had tried to patch. The chewed-off paw was still stuck to the glue trap. I felt a little sick.
We just lay there in the half-dark for a long time, not talking, listening to each other breathe.
02
We moved in with Bruce a month later. My mom said she loved him. I loved him because he had a dog. Her name was Shadow and she was a shaggy mutt whose fur was the same color as my hair. Bruce lived in a real house with a backyard and everything. He had his own landscaping company, and a big truck with his company logo painted on the side. He didn’t cook but he liked to grill and on cool summer nights after my mom got home from work sometimes we would sit outside on the patio while Bruce flipped burgers and flipped the pull-tabs from his beer into the grass. He used to pay me a nickel for each one I could find.
I had my own room at Bruce’s. I missed sleeping next to my mom but I liked being able to close my door, to decorate my room with all the drawings I did in art class. I mostly drew pictures of Shadow. Unless my mom was working weekend shifts, no one was there when I got home from school, and I would let Shadow out to pee and give her some water and a treat and pretend she was mine. Bruce used to keep her in the yard at night, but I started sneaking her in before I went to bed, when they were drinking on the couch in the TV room. Shadow was scared to jump up on my bed at first, but I kept patting the mattress and soon she got used to it, started whimpering at the door at night if I didn’t let her in. One morning my mom came to wake me up for school and saw Shadow and instead of getting mad she just laughed and then it was okay. I could never tell if she was going to laugh or get angry when I did something and it always made me nervous.
We were out on the patio and my mom was at the table, cutting up iceberg lettuce and tomatoes for a salad while Bruce grilled. I was brushing Shadow’s fur. Bruce and my mom were always tired when they got home from work. My mom said she would kill for a job where she didn’t have to be on her feet all day, where she didn’t feel like all she did her whole life was serve people food. “At least my customers tip,” she said, “and I’m not even making their food.” Bruce said nothing, just added more lighter fluid to the grill. Flames burst up from between the iron bars, and the meat crackled.
“Who’s making you dinner right now?” he said. “Who went out and bought your fuckin’ ground meat on the way home from my own job, which isn’t exactly a picnic for me either. At least you get to be inside all day.”
My mom slammed another