Mice
By Arabella Saunders
In my father’s outstretched palms were six baby mice. They were pink and dewy, their eyes unopened.
“Go,” he said to my mother. “Drown them over there.”
We were standing on the side of I-40, somewhere between Texas and Arizona, heading west. There was clay the color of sand, brittle brown shrubs and a cloudless sky so expansive it made your eyes water. There was also a pond to the left of our car, just down a rocky slope on the edge of the flat road. It was bright green. When I asked my father why it looked like that he said it was because someone had dyed it. My mother just cried.
The six baby mice had come from Petuna, my pet. She was the size of a small potato with chocolate brown fur as soft as a brand-new blanket. I’d won her at the end-of-school carnival a few weeks before. When I brought her home, my father was furious. He didn’t think the school had any business sending a child home with a pet. A rodent at that. I immediately began to cry, begging him to let me keep her. I told him I would feed her and give her water every day. When he told me she needed a cage I told him I would pay for it. I would sell my clothes, even the bright red shoes my mother had gotten me for Christmas after we watched The Wizard of Oz. When Judy Garland sang Somewhere Over the Rainbow, my mother sang with her, delicately and under her breath like she did at church. My father sang differently at church. He was a baritone with deep and commanding breath.
It was my mother who convinced him to let me keep Petuna. She’d had an unusual pet when she was a girl, a chicklet named Sammy. This was back when you could go to the grocery store during Easter and they’d have a box at the entrance full of dyed chicks. My mother picked out a purple one and her father, gentle as ever, let her keep it. My mother and Sammy went everywhere together. They splashed in the cool creek, crawled between tobacco leaves as big as elephant ears, climbed the church spire’s creaky stairs to ring the bell.
By the Fourth of July, Sammy had shed the last of his purple feathers. He was bigger, too. The size of a can of peas. When my mother learned she wouldn’t be able to take him to the schoolhouse with her, she cried so hard she gave herself a headache that lasted for three days. Her father drove her into town to see the doctor. He let her bring Sammy and she sat in the backseat and hugged him like a teddy bear as she leaned her head against the hot window and watched the watermelon fields woosh by. Occasionally, she squeezed Sammy even tighter and cried into his soft feathers. When they got to the doctor's office and her father opened the door for her to climb out, my mother gently handed Sammy to him. “Oh, darling,” he said, looking down at her, the sun half obscuring his leathery face. “Sammy’s dead.”
I watched from the backseat, my head peeking over the child-locked window, as my father slipped the six baby mice we didn’t realize Petuna had been carrying into my mother’s outstretched hands. They looked like tiny glass figurines, their hairless skin reflecting in the sun. My mother didn’t look up. She kept her eyes fixed on her hands as she drifted toward the pond. I squeezed Petuna lightly, pressing her against my chin, my breath fluttering her fur like wind falling down a hill. My father leaned his butt against the hood of the car. My mother’s auburn hair was long and curly and streaks of blonde danced in the light. She bent down next to the pond and clasped her palms together. She lowered them into the bright green water. I counted to 27. We never spoke about it again.
THE END
Author Bio: Arabella Saunders is a writer based in New York City. Her work has been featured in VICE Magazine, HuffPost, Milepost Magazine and Cellar Door Magazine. She was born and raised on the Outer Banks.