The mouse at my feet is tiny and brown, its paws and face stuck in the pus-colored swaths of glue smeared on the cardstock, a few nuggets of its own shit strewn behind. A shovel in my hands, I watch it jerk back and forth trying to free itself.

     “They need to go,” says Len, my supervisor at the grain elevator. “They get in the corn and the wheat and the milo and cause diseases and cause trouble.”

     This is what I do now—rodent executioner.

     Once everyone cooled down, Beth’s dad called in a favor to land me this job; he knows the elevator’s owner. A month ago, I sat in math class, English class. I learned the dates of treaties, the inner workings of the human body, the importance of using protection. I stared across the classroom and studied how Beth’s bottom lip pursed out and down when she concentrated, like a wilting rose petal, how her left eye crinkled when she became confused, how every intake of breath caused the lines of her bra to become achingly clear through her t-shirt, forming shallow ridges to create the topography of the most wonderful planet in creation. When we were alone, in the back seat of her Geo Metro, in the wonderful claustrophobia of her tiny bedroom, or in the woods that bordered the pastures behind her house, the scent of her clavicle was enough to make me think all other things were just white noise. A month ago, I was distracted by the fresh memories of how her lips felt caressing mine and the warm amber of sunlight filtering through a window in squares across her bare skin, by the daydreams of a wonderful life we’d have when we left together this fall for UCLA. 

     Two weeks ago, we sat on the edge of Beth’s bed, praying with the urgency of trapped rodents over the pregnancy test laid in her lap, when a thin, blue line was drawn down the middle of our existence, separating our lives now from our lives then. 

     Len takes the shovel out of my hands and slams the tip down through the quivering mouse, the sound of metal on concrete ringing off the corrugated walls of the elevator, the last movements of its body flooded in crimson. He tells me to toss the trap into the garbage, mouse and all, then help one of the other guys bag an order of horse feed. When I drop the mouse into the can, I look at its tiny body, withered and bloody, about to be buried in the everyday waste of grain dust and discarded food containers.

     I asked Beth what she wanted to do, if it was something she wanted to have “taken care of.” She glared at me in a way I’d never seen from her until that moment, the idea so unthinkable to her that for the first time I thought she might hate me. I made certain not to bring that idea up when we told her parents, her father instead giving me a lecture for an uninterrupted hour on responsibility and marriage and my future. Last week, he called and told me to report Monday to the grain elevator a half-mile outside town on Turnbull Road; he’d found me a job, full-time, with benefits.

     Before my first day of work, I stood across the road and stared at the elevator, a monolith towering over the flat horizon of the plains, the only thing breaking the enormity of the sky. Its steel exterior had the same filthy dullness as the gravel lots and fields surrounding it, the same flat disinterest as the men I’d be working with. I was a dot at the side of a country road.

     With the spade’s bloody tip, Len draws another glue trap out from behind a stack of bagged horse feed and hands me the shovel. “Bring it down quick, and don’t miss.  It’s just a mouse, but even he deserves a break,” he says. “How would you like to be suffering like that?”

     I look down at the mouse, this one grey and barely twitching, its face and body stuck to the cardstock. I hear its squealing pleas for mercy, and I grip the wooden handle tighter.

	About the Author: Ande Davis is a student and writer living in Mankato, MN. He is currentlythe managing editor for Blue Earth Review. This is his first publication.

Home     About Us    Submissions    Pushcart Nominees     Masthead     Archives