Forgive me if I’m rambling, this is me on weed— A Human Meets a Mouse?

The mouse next door knew instinctively that I was me while I was oblivious of his existence.

I smoked a week old blunt I’d gotten form the one African American woman I know. I sat in the wood behind our house where a dead tree turned to a bench after that winter storm we had at the end of spring. My mind relayed the crunch as my mocha Birkenstocks crushed last fall’s fallen leaves. Scantily clad, I feared seeing a snake at my hill. Nonetheless, the summer air was warm and deliciously heavy upstate New York that first, mask- free May.

I may have been sitting on the mouse next door’s house smoking pot, coughing an amateur smoker’s cough, filling the mouse next door’s house with the smell. I was breaking no laws, a police siren could be heard nearby, and I said thank God, weed is legal now. Weed is so legal I could grow some if I wanted. I scanned the backyard like I owned that land which “belonged” to the Congolese immigrants who bought it from the European settler/American. Purple flowers like miniature pine trees, jutted out the lawn underneath tree corpses.

Maybe the mouse knew better than to bother me, who is to say? Maybe he was out his hole by the time I got to the one of over a hundred fallen trees in the county. We had a snow day near the end of our Spring Semester! Think about it.

Back to Tommy, let’s call him Tommy, I’m tired of saying “The Mouse Next Door,” it’s a little insensitive to identify someone solely by how they look. After thinking what he thought, Tommy’ had already jumped into the hole I’d crawled out from, and I didn’t even know coz I was still snuffing out that blunt against the tree trunk. I know, I may have used the front door, but I fancied a shortcut through a breezy window. Scratch that. I like the idea of crawling out a hole to chill in the woods just because. I found Tommy standing like a man, sniffing, and poking his nose through the half-open window. Or maybe he was bracing himself before entering because he knows about the others. He knew how my Dominican roommate and I set the glue traps in the first Covid summer.

Right then Tommy thought in one steady stream:

Man why the glue traps doesn’t [s]he know the agony of being a [wo]man stuck in one place so long your neck can’t move it feels

like you are George Floyd under that officer’s knee only you can breathe and you’re wondering as you struggle to pull your skin and hair

out of this monstrous sticky mess if     this is how you die skinning yourself off your black and brown skin thinking    what more can you give

to feel         less stuck     no        to          soar       easy    like a feather in the wind and        JUST -BE- COMFORTABLE -BEING-YOU!”

In 2020’s summer, my roommate and I killed at least five mice who had decided to quarantine in our kitchen. We had a supply of red beans in the pantry. They got stuck in the glue traps. Someone bludgeoned them to death. It wasn’t me, I just stood by. Others were more hands on. An autopsy of the dead JDs might have revealed blunt force trauma to the body, bean morsels in their GI tract, and a sticky substance, likely Tom Cat on their hair, but they don’t get autopsies, they are just tossed. My mother never got an autopsy, so I can kind of relate to just being dug in and forgotten. To this sentiment, maybe Tommy knows I’m not malignant, but he hides in a nook by the window when he sees me. My shoulders shoot up and I lean back with my eyes wide open— I’m red-eyed like a cyborg when I see Tommy, brown as me by my open window.

Once, some years back, someone tried to break into my apartment in Walvis Bay and left the aluminum-framed window broken. While I waited for the landlady to fix the window, and install an alarm system, the window the thief had broken stood ajar. It looked like an open gasping mouth, judging me as I walked into the yard with my long face like I had sour medicine on my tongue, balancing two boxes of grading stacked to the brim. I wanted to read those exam scripts like I wanted a love letter from a stalker who couldn’t spell. Each time I found that window open, a piece of me broke off and shattered. I kept thinking of that thief who broke that window, and how he ran away when I switched my voice and yelled “WIE’S DAAR” in a heart-shattering, base vibrato. If not so, whatever that voice was, it worked.

So, I’m staring at Tommy with his little eyes like two glossy chia seeds, dark brown skin like the not-so-dark south Asian, or the Southern African with a white great grandfather, [s]he is ashamed to admit because people will think [s]he’s trying to be white. So, she says she’s a Herero now, despite also being somewhat a Damara, nobody protests because now, she’s almost unstuck. See, she’s in the place an ex used to call “the land of the living,” the place a friend said, “was not heaven,” America.

So, I stared at Tommy as he attempted but failed to hide in that nook. And at that time, I wondered if he felt the way I felt when I believed in God. How I wished to become invisible, or so insignificant God could walk past me and not even notice? I could not unsee Tommy by my window, and just crawl in!

I thought in one breathless sentence:

Fuck! My window is still open! What if Tommy jumps in and eats my… oh, I threw out those beans your friends left over. Remember that time they blamed a disease on the animals… was it rats, was it fleas? Surely, there’s nothing in there you like, or, do you eat rice noodles? I hear y’all chew through metal, is it true? Ha-ha, that was a Shakespeare inspired hyperbole.

Tommy reminds me of a mouse I know. I figured that mouse came from Brooklyn because the stocky Congolese man from whose bag he jumped lived there with Uncle E, the landlady’s husband who is a high school teacher/math genius nearing retirement. Anyway, I gloved my hand with a plastic shopping bag and picked up that New York City mouse, his still body was the wight of the smallest dumbbell in the gym—this is a slight exaggeration. I made sure to avoid his mouth and threw him not too far away from our house. He landed with a thud, like a tennis ball against a carpeted floor on land some contractors were clearing for God-knows-what. There were wood chips everywhere and the land suddenly looked khaki, like the Schutztruppe uniform used by Germany’s troops in German Southwest Africa. I felt I was doing the world good by saving a lost mouse from an African woman’s will to survive. That was a different time, and I was a vegan for the animals.

The mouse from New York played dead, and I knew he was because, I used to be a biology teacher—allow me to flex—I know you don’t have to be a biology teacher to know rodents play dead. It’s just that after you get unstuck for the first time, and you see how massive your wingspan is, you cannot help but show the colors under your wings sometimes. Tommy sure does look like that Brooklyn mouse, but I cannot tell because that other mouse had his eyes closed. They all look the same, these mice.

My Dominican Roommate and I killed mice with glue traps and hot water, and broomsticks and yells—well, mostly her. I’m not the yelling, running, and fighting type. I mainly avoided the killing but revelled in knowing there was one less mouse in our space.  

I sat on my couch and wrote this rambling, paranoid that I may have mice warned by Tommy, hiding in my cupboard right now, waiting to devour my noodles, my laptop cable which already has a band aid, and my, get this, canned beans the moment lights go out, or my clothes, or me while I sleep! Now I hear sounds in the house I never heard before, or maybe I’m just paranoid. I celebrated the death of over three dirty mice who died because there are just too many of them, and we couldn’t possibly be locked down with them dancing on our kitchen sink and pooping black rice all over our counter! Plus, mice may have caused and spread the Bubonic Plague? —Hah not that—Bats in a wet market on another continent spread “The Virus.” Tommy and I are two animals that normally don’t hang out and I don’t know what may come of this chance encounter.

So, I went around the house waited for a minute and came back to the hole where my now closed Window was, as I asked Tommy the question, are you the look out? Because, I think I may have heard you beep twice. So what was that squeak I heard, come from you? Was it you telling your friends to stand by and not stand back? —OR was it you, saying, “we’re fucked?” I’ll go again, I say to Tommy, hiding his face in that nook like a kid in time-out; and, please I say,  just go, I don’t want to hurt you or anything, idgaf if you exist, just stay out of “my house,” I want to get in through that window, and eat because now I have got the munchies.

So, I pace the house and find me a stick where the landlords have stacked firewood which now look like the gray school socks I used to wear in high school, ridges and all, to poke him so he moves to the corner farthest from my window. He does but he’s also both terrified and feisty, I see in how his pelt ripples every time I poke me— He’s like, fine poke me with your crooked stick, but make sure I don’t get to your face. I’ll eat that nose you keep staring at in the mirror, hating! I swear he’s thinking that because right now my nose is twitching, I want to get a whiff of Tommy. He doesn’t stink like the mouse my friend from Walvis wrote about in a poem. I poke him and he hides his face behind a leaf the color of mature rust. I scoff and tell him he is stupid, and does he think because he cannot see me, I cannot see him?

I climb into the hole and Tommy looks at me from behind the leaf with that WTF face—like he can’t believe big-brained bipedal organisms also climb through windows. He looks at me with an open mouth, as I slip in through the window feeling for the chair with my foot while signaling for Tommy to stay. I tell Tommy, not with words, just my mind that we are big and “civilized” and when we are scared, we take sticks, poke you away with them and ensure our houses. We shut our windows and we promise to set more glue traps even if there is really no reason to, because maybe just maybe, Tommy really meant no harm, he just wanted to chill until his house stopped smelling like weed, because he doesn’t indulge in a life of “substance,” while I with my black-rimmed square spectacles, a yellow HB pencil stuck in my curly tapered cut, do. I listened to poetry podcasts all day today and I justified it as work! And I will write a long poem/creative nonfiction/fiction piece and feel I sound smart. I don’t even instinctively know Tommy’s real name like he knows I’m me. Who knows what else he knows? I don’t know where my deer, garden snake, ground hog and chipmunk neighbors live? The animals here are different, and honestly, I don’t know if Tommy is even a mouse, maybe he is a Polynesian RAT!!!

Mercia Kandukira was born in Omaruru, Namibia where she obtained her B. Ed at the University of Namibia. As a Fulbright scholar, Mercia obtained her MA in English Creative Writing at Binghamton State University of New York where she now pursues a doctoral degree in English.

Her creative nonfiction has appeared in Windmill: the Hofstra Journal of Literature and Art and is forthcoming in Alchemy Literary Magazine. Her Short Fiction is forthcoming in Praxis: Journal of Gender and Cultural Critiques.