Mouse Nest

I came to the following reflection —my “Mouse Nest”— in the company of a working group that has spent parts of the last few years exploring the entwinement of horror and enchantment. Horror & Enchantment in the past, in the present and future, at home, abroad, in others, in ourselves. Currently revising an earlier draft for discussion in the here-and-now, and towards our forthcoming book, it feels right also to share it with you, to float this draft memorywork as a dispatch.

Do you have a comment? A reaction? A suggestion? I’d be grateful to know.

OUR HOUSE IS stucco, with a wood trim that matches the 1960s pale-green of the station wagon in the driveway. In the gardens front and back my father fills flower beds and planters. On the steps sit my mother and two younger sisters. A tree – transplanted amidst fresh soil and wood-chips – does its bit to blink hope.

The new sub-division in which the house stands eats away at the fields of surrounding farms. The fields are right there to see and smell.

A mix of manure and mystery beneath an open sky.

If the farmer’s fields cast a beckoning spell, then so too, in another way, does the older brother of my friend and neighbour Carol. An older sibling is something I don’t have, and thus of infinite value. I can’t help watching Carol’s brother Richard closely whenever he enters a room or walks by. A big boy, he doesn’t need to speak. He embodies an unimaginable mingling of confidence and boredom, a sophistication granted as if from on high, and only to the world-weary and wise. Because he is tall and nine years old, Richard must know things, probably even about sex.

My friends and I may still long to be read to in bed. But even we already understand that, in the absence of trusty steeds and earthy squires, adventurers need props. Broken ice hockey sticks – the blades snapped off – will have to do. Our re-purposed pilgrims’ staffs - for that is how I yearn to remember them - are personal. I remember the feel of my fingers closing around the improvised hockey-tape grip at the top, vestige of my walking stick’s sporty former life.

We’re a tiny troupe of five or six children setting out from our edge of town, across the vast field, our destination some trees, fed by a spring, in the distance. Sharp stubble pricks our ankles and calves, but like miniature Jobs we expect a bit of suffering and hardly notice.

All that matters is that Richard is in the lead. Did the older boy know what lay ahead, in the clump of trees? Was the act of leading us little ones there part of a plan?

After a cheerfully exhausted child-slump upon arrival, we re-assemble in the shade of a tree. We are kneeling to peer closely at something mysterious. Who made the discovery? Who urged us on? Hidden within a larger thicket of branches, grass and leaves, is a still tighter, a meticulous weave – shreds of paper, plastic half-lids and gum wrappers sewn into more grass and twigs.

One of us is brave enough to draw apart the strands, peeling back the layers, to reveal a squirming, mewing, living mass within.

Our faces are centimetres away from a nest that is home to dozens of baby mice. A pinkish grey, enveloped in a wet translucent film as if still in place of their own skin, the baby mice are impossibly vulnerable, their eyes shut tight as the light and very air we bring disturbs their nursery.

We’re scared, as I recall at least, all wide eyes and tense mouths before what is jarringly icky, moist and seething. But nothing is jumping out. Nothing threatens here. As a calm descends, we’re all smiles and laughter. We're curious inspection. My friends and I point out our mousely favourites. Who can resist that plucky runt on the far side, surviving an unpromising beginning, holding her own in the world.

The sharp end of a hockey stick appears as if out of nowhere, thrust fast and hard, again and again, into the heart of the nest. The fast stick is unleashed, lethal and wild. It’s Richard. He’s killing and not stopping.  Before we’re able to look away, we’re compelled to look closer. At the devastation.

As we smaller children jump up and run, do I glimpse Richard’s face? Does he look crazed or darkly cruel? Is he certain? Or is he, a child too, amazed, afraid and insecure in his own way? Is he caught up in his older boy’s desperation to frighten the likes of me, to impress the little ones by whatever means?

Winded and red-faced, still too shaken to wail, we scatter and race back through the field, each of us alone, all the way home.

* Photographs near Red Deer, Alberta, Canada, by Kenneth Mills

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