CNF: Seeing Still

by Beth Cleary

 

There is a gray mouse, her body the size of an apricot, front legs and right cheek stuck in a glue trap. I stare, forget the broom and dustpan. A glue trap? In the middle of these temperate woods, door open half the day? The apricot mouse will die of cardiac arrest. The apricot mouse deserves mercy. I consider walloping her with an iron skillet, shortening the struggle. It’s not my house, not my skillet, not my glue trap. I back away, I crouch outside near a persimmon tree and I am panting. I don’t have the heart, and I will see that mouse in that trap for years.

Orange orbs swing from their branches, jeering.

***

My father tells us they hit him in the night. “That one there,” his eyes narrow, “he’s one of them.” I look, a young man in scrubs is carrying a medication tray. My father sees things that aren’t there, it is the disease. He tells my sister there are mice in his closet. She lays catch-and-release traps for his anxiety about the nonexistent mice. He says his brother and sister-in-law come to visit. They’ve been dead thirty years. Says his mother is in the kitchen every morning. Dead sixty years.

I don’t think the young man hits him in the night, but I watch how he puts the tray down and leaves without a word.

***

My mother drags last Fall’s leaves into a big pile I will jump in. But today, raking, she uncovers baby creatures in the exposed dirt. They uncurl and stretch in the new air, the new light. My mother pauses, electric. Then she reaches the rake past the newborns and bites off a rag of winter-matted leaves. She drags this straight through the babies and swings it all up onto the pile. She does this again and again, to make sure she’s killed them. If she remembers I am right there she says nothing. I see the tree, the ground, the leaves, the rake, her skirt, her shoes, those writhing animals. I see them still.

I do not jump in that leaf pile, that burial mound. I want to say I remember them.

***

I wake up the morning of my father’s funeral to frost on the windows. It has snowed a foot overnight, an early April surprise. I didn’t pack shoes for snow.

My father is dead six years and I see him every day. I watch him surface from the gyre of forgetting to ask about my dog, recite old phone numbers, comment on the sky. He knows, more than he can say. We should have asked more questions.

***

In the backyard are three apple trees and a pine. The apples are not good, misshapen and wormy, but the trees are good for climbing. I pretend I live in the tree and will never come down. I curl like a squirrel in a just-sized nest. I drape as a jaguar would over a strong branch, tail-tip flicking. Robins and crows land, take off. Rabbits dart from compost pile to hydrangea thicket. I hear the clamor of all the outside songs, each creature’s need to be and be believed.

My jaguar paradise is now a parking lot. I request stewed apricots with lunch, and the medication tray is rarely on time. It is assumed I don’t notice, don’t remember. I do, all the innocents.

 

Beth Cleary’s essays are published in Fourth Genre, Essay Daily, The Maine Review, Invisible City and other journals. She holds a PhD from UC-Berkeley in theater history and directing, and taught at the college level for a quarter century. She lives with her partner and dogs in St. Paul, Minnesota where, in 2014, she co-founded the East Side Freedom Library.

 

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