The Mice Inside Me

I am a barn without an owl.

Last night, and every night since the weather turned cold and the horses were ushered in with their clip-clop hustle, the mice underfoot have taken refuge, tunneling through hay and scurrying along the beams. I scarce can stand the noise. They creep beneath my skin the moment I get still.

I pull the sheet higher and wrestle to keep it folded, just so, over the crimp and itch of the top blanket, a necessary weight to shield me against the cold, seeping in through the double sliding doors. I don’t have the energy to get up and shut the blinds. When I was a child, it was the gaping mouth of the closet door, open wide in a scream, waiting to swallow me while I slept. It was the drape of my covers hanging too low over the side of the bed, hiding the grin and shriek and gray bony hand, waiting to grab me by the ankle. It hurt to hold my bladder.

I have always been a barn without the grace and bloody hunger of a barn owl, to eat that which scurries inside of me.

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Gerald said they skinned the kids alive. Pulled their screaming limbs inside the white van, skinned them, a..l…i…v…e.

“What kids?” I asked him, wide-eyed, some sick place in my stomach crawling with the mice. Sometimes they changed places like that. The scalp, the tummy, sometimes inside my legs. At school they were everywhere, always waking when momma turned that last corner and began the slow, uphill crawl to the big silver doors. They were heavier than my jeans. And believe me, my jeans were heavy. Bulky at the knees and ankles and heavy.

Momma would smile, hug me, wish me a good day at school. I don’t think there was such a thing for a barn-girl, a mice-girl, a pants-too-heavy and socks-turned-under kind of girl. A what happened to your hair kind of girl.

“Kids like you, little, and big ones like me. Their parents never… saw… them… again. They hung ‘em up, like on a clothesline. Drip. Drip. Drip.” Gerald grinned, satisfied. He surely topped himself this time, after I learned the monkeys were indeed mourning doves and not, most certainly not, monkeys. Daddy said so.

I waited for the white vans to come for me. I saw them at the grocery store and begged mom not to park right up next to them. We’d roll in, mom in a hurry. Momma was always in a hurry. I slid along the side of the car, waiting for the bony gray hands – the hands were always bony and gray and old, weren’t they? – and two-stepped, holding Momma’s hand, through the parking lot, right over the cracks – no time to skip them and sometimes, oh Momma, I’m sorry – and right by the trinket machines where once she’d left me standing, dreaming, alone. It’s good the white vans didn’t see. That day the bony fingers didn’t come for me. I was quiet. I could be invisible if I wanted.

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My husband doesn’t understand why – when I made it very clear to him there’s no such thing as silence – I must always have the sounds of winter playing while we sleep.

Alexa knows my favorite and faithfully, while I contemplate shutting the blinds, she begins the Winter Nature Sounds as I have asked; the sound of snow that’s so near silence, more of a whisper carried through the air, so quiet. So quiet. I ask my husband to turn off the light. He slips an arm across my stomach and I try not to become invisible. The hairs on his arm offend my skin. I will myself not to think of it.

I fall – the scream and feet of mice and all – into the quiet of the snow, the crackle and hiss and whir of nature-y snow filtering through that little dot of a speaker and I hope sleep comes quickly.

The whisper-silence makes me think of owls, swooping on a hush, to snatch those mice, right from my skin, my eyes, my hair. Take them, I beg. I visualize the barn, higher than high, unreachable high: tall, two stories, painted beige, soft, safe, neutral, non-threatening beige or maybe greige.

Two wide doors pulled aside, and inside, the horses, each astride knobby knees and sleek muscles, slick with sweat. They have had their fill of clover and tender shoots from the field. They are happy to nuzzle my shoulder. I slide my hand down the flanks of each of them, warm and slick. I call each of them by name. Miss Emma regards me with wide brown eyes and long, silvery lashes. She brushes my cheek, her prickly muzzle a huff across my ear.

Great beams stretch overhead; one, two, three, four of them and on the fourth, she waits for me. Whisper-quiet like the snow. Her kind, deep eyes scanning for rodents to feed her young.

Sleep, precious sleep, comes for me, gently.