You Sound Just Like Your Mother

by Benjamin Davis

 

My father took to killing mice about as well as can be expected. Especially after one got half-snapped in the middle of the night, he woke to the tick-tick-tick of a trap being dragged back and forth across the kitchen floor. It went on for hours, he said, I had to wait in my room with the fan on.

He took it so hard he went and panic-bought three buckets, six planks of wood, and a hundred dollars of peanut butter. They’re ethical traps, he told me. They climb in for the peanut butter, then you release them into the woods. Later, the exterminator would ask him if he’d thought to spray paint them before letting them go to make sure it wasn’t the same mice coming back for more. He hadn’t.

We had dinner together every Wednesday night. Just inside the door was a whiteboard he used for unmemorized phone numbers and reminders. This time, it only said: 11. The house shook when I shut the door, so my father called, Hello?! from his bedroom, as he always does, as if this time, surely, it’s someone here to murder him. I found three more today, he tells me, erasing the board. Next week, it read: 17, and the whole house smelled of peppermint. I found him in the basement, chucking cotton balls under the sofa. Mice hate peppermint.

When it got to 23, he gave up and called the exterminator. When he came, my father told him all about the peanut butter and buckets and peppermint while the exterminator made his spray paint joke. They both chuckled in that friendly way anyone might when trying not to ignore the adorable brutality of the situation.

I wanted to help the mice understand. He tried his best, I could tell them. If only they hadn’t chewed up the legs of one of the couches or scurried around keeping him awake at night. He’s not a killer, my father. I’d tell them that. He tried everything he could. Maybe I could say to them about how he needs his sleep because he struggles with mental health. Or somehow point out how much worse he could have been. He could have spray-painted them, after all. That even though they might have felt at war with some great big undefinable thing that it’s only my father. Maybe they’d find it in their hearts to forgive him—still as they may be.

 

Benjamin Davis (he/him) has stories and poems in several literary journals including Booth, Moon City Review, Wigleaf, and Slippery Elm Press. His poem collection, The King of FU (Nada Blank, 2018), was such a smashing success it shocked the indie press who printed it into an early grave. He is now writing his first six novels. Find him on Chill Subs.

 

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