For the 20 or there about years I have lived in my house, my family and I seem to have had some kind of communicated peace with the mice who inhabit the ceiling of my basement. We stopped trying to kill them with our final solution of chemicals of every design shortly after moving in and they promised to stay out of sight, although the pitter patter of scurrying feet still persists. I thought their persistance to live here was a beautiful refusal of our eviction notice...so long as they stay out of sight. The deal seems disturbingly human in character.
Surely the mice who lived in our house before my family took up residence here have died. Generations must have come and gone; new lodgers checking in and out. Even after the drop ceiling was fully replaced, we never saw a dead mouse. Their droppings, sure, but nothing that resembles a nest or home. We didn't find a plastic wheel that they seem so found of. I wondered if they came and went in and out at their own choice somehow through a leak in the house. Now I believe their commerce and exchange with the outside world was cut off long ago. But life went on. How they lived and reproduced and survived being cut off from nature is beyond Hickman's Brick. It's a vexing mystery to me, but I think that through consideration of the word "survived," that I have come closs to solving what I think about only when I hear the feet, which, according to my father, betrays our deal of co-existence.
Ten years ago I remember catches glimpses of mice tails as one of my co-inhabitants would run across the panel of our ceiling lights. White tail, white mouse, white lightning. Nothing was complicated about a white mouse. To hear a solitary rodent for a brief second or two never roused much response from me. Yesterday, though, after years and years of mouse-human peace, I spent a face to mouse face commercial break length of time with what I can only assume is still "mouse." (Survived?)
I walked down into the basement in the dark and saw on the floor what I thought was a curled up Maple leaf. Turning on the 40 Watt lamp, positioned from behind--the angle which I prefer to view the world--and I could see that this was not foliage.
"So we meet at last," I might well have said, although I don't think the "mouse" would have thought my comment amusing. The animal on the floor was stocky like a frog, brown and white and had a tail. It didn't move. The terrain was foreign to it, having living all life between my basement and kitchen. It seemed desperate, yet brave. It stood its ground, as if entitled to it.
Standing over this tiny and silent "mouse," I was given an impromptu lecture in divergent evolution. For moments I only looked at it. I had no idea what types of movements this animal was capable of making. I had never seen such a creature. I had compassion for it. I thought that it must have fallen from the ceiling. I don't know if I was charmed or if merely my sense was aroused, but because this, again, "mouse," didn't run off, I felt intimate in spending that last of the warm evenings with it.
One of us should have been talking, but we never said a thing, nor did we act upon one another. I took my clothes from off the pool table, killed the 40 Watt, and went back upstairs. I decided not to tell either parent--mother or father--about the supposed mouse I saw on the floor, and the "mouse" embassador hasn't revealed itself again, although I've looked.
Now when I hear the feet I nod greyfully. We have made our aquantance and have entered our third decade of human-mouse peace.
I decided to remodel my plague tumor, because while it does look like it should according to the pic below, it just wasn't gross enough
Halloween costume at work, part 2. This time I decided to make the plague bubo look more like it's ripe and ready to burst. I did more of a hemorrhage-type look with purples and blacks and specks of blood, instead of a lighter colored pus-filled sac. Curiously enough both my makeup effects seem to match up with the few photographs of a plague bubo that I have seen.
I couldn't possibly capture the full horror of having/seeing one of these
You've served me well
