The Other Heartbeat
By Melanie Pierce
The only other heartbeat in my home belongs to a mouse.
He wriggles into the bottom kitchen drawer where my spices rattle together when I yank the drawer open—I only get into that drawer when I am cooking and when I’m cooking I am a yanker—and he chews on the plastic caps to make holes big enough for his paw to slip in and I don’t know how he doesn’t get stuck but he grabs claw-fulls of his favorites, which seem to be dill weed and mustard seeds and red pepper flakes.
I have to wipe down the spice bottles with disinfectant before using them and I worry that despite the bleach I’ll catch some kind of plague but I’m also tickled. My mouse is a fancy mouse.
***
For a long time there was another heartbeat in my home, which belonged to a man. He was a good man, an okay man, and well really he was just fine, but still it was nice to feel another heartbeat in my bed when I woke up.
Since him there have been others, but heartbeats belonging to men always leave or rather they fade softer, slowly, and then spirit away and I’m left wondering where the hell did they go. I think the thing is I transform men’s hearts into blocks of ice and freezing blood cold within the veins is a quiet process so I don’t realize it’s happening.
Maybe I will be an Ice Queen for Halloween. I won’t need to buy a costume. I can dress as myself and bring pictures of the men whose hearts used to beat in my home and when people ask what are you supposed to be? I’ll whip out the photos and flip through them like baseball cards and say I am the motherfucking Ice Queen.
***
I have to go three places to buy a live trap.
At Stop & Shop, they only have the traps that snap the mouse’s neck in half.
At Rite Aid, the old man greeter says yes they have mouse traps. As he leads me back to the aisle with rat poison and glue traps and wasp spray he tells me the Spanish words for mouse and rat and looks at me expectantly for what I don’t know so I laugh and he shows me the traps but they are the ones that snap the mouse’s neck in half so I tell him I want live traps but he doesn’t understand so I explain I don’t want to kill the mouse I just want it out of my house and he pats my elbow and says don’t worry because when it snaps the mouse’s neck in half I will hear it and I can cover the mouse carcass with a paper towel so I don’t have to see it and wear thick gloves so I don’t have to feel it and I say uhh that’s not why I want a live trap and doesn’t anyone care about humanely catching their household pests anymore and he looks at me like I am the cutest little girl he has ever seen.
At Ace Hardware, I wasn’t going to ask. I planned to wander the aisles until I figured it out myself but the cashier is a woman and her lipstick is the same pink as the underside of a seashell even though she could pull off red if she wanted. So I ask and she sells me two little plastic grey traps. She opens the package to show me how they work: the mouse walks in, the door snaps shut, and he’s locked away but alive.
***
There is a photograph of the final moment that the really just fine man had blood still flowing through his veins.
I threw him a birthday party at a brewery and in the picture we’re standing in the middle of his friends holding beers and smiling sloppily. The guy who took the selfie had apparently never taken a selfie before but its crookedness adds to the sloppy happy feeling of the photo however when we drove home the man told me he felt like I was freezing him out because at his own birthday party I stood in the corner and didn’t talk enough and I wanted to say whenever I talk to your friends they say things like so is being a paralegal like a career for you or a stepping stone to law school? and oh a children’s book I thought Jay said you were a writer? and how can you call yourself a feminist if your goal is to be a stay-at-home dog mom? and I wanted to shout whenever they say these things you just look at me the same way they look at me like you are also waiting to hear my answer but that night I was the designated driver because when it’s someone else’s birthday you volunteer to be the designated driver and because I was concentrated on driving with three beers and birthday cake sloshing around in my system all I said was good grief.
The crooked sloppy happy photo sits on my Instagram. I think sometimes about taking it down but it’s nice to have a picture with other people in it. That chat we had in the car does bother me though when I reflect on it which I strive not to do because if I think about it too hard it will crack open my sternum and get at my rib cage and pry the halves apart like a hyena ripping into the innards of a still dying gazelle.
***
The mouse ate my coconut flour.
I bought the flour for a clean-eating diet which is the kind of thing I never do but I did it right after the second-to-last man had gotten frozen so I thought maybe forgoing gluten for a while would be beneficial but I used it once and that was two months ago so I didn’t see that the mouse had been inside the coconut flour until he had eaten a lot of it.
Somehow that mouse got through the Ziploc seal without knocking over the bag. I saw it and wondered why the bag was open so I pulled it off the shelf and there were hundreds of mice droppings laced through the white and some of his tiny brown hairs.
I am a little annoyed because coconut flour is not cheap but I’m a little amused because what kind of mouse eats coconut flour when he could have chosen the Lucky Charms?
After I throw out the flour I’m sitting at the kitchen table when I hear the mouse skitter across the pantry shelf. I’m about to stand up and shoo him off when he shrieks once twice even a third time and then runs away. I feel a little bad but also proud. I had a problem. I took action to resolve it. I did something real.
***
I told the administrative assistants at the firm about my mouse. They show their unique style by dyeing their hair varying shades of blonde or red or brown but when their roots start to grow out it can be hard to tell them apart.
They were all like eww have you actually seen him? and that is so gross! and don’t you know they carry disease? and I was like well yeah but he’s a neat and tidy mouse who likes mixing sweet with spicy and they were like damn girl you found yourself the dream mouse.
After misterjustfine I used to tell them about my break-ups. They would cluck and hum and take me out to a lunch of nachos and margaritas and it was nice. But then I guess it started to get prohibitively expensive plus Shannon would overdo it every time and we’d have to take turns holding her hair in the stall for the rest of the afternoon and so our productivity you could say dropped somewhat on those days.
***
I’m sitting on the couch clipping my nails for something to do when I hear him inside the wall.
I don’t know what he’s doing in there. Arranging wooden shavings into a nest? Nibbling on stored up piles of dill weed? Combing his whiskers with his little clawed paws?
I stretch over the armrest and put my palm against the wall and I thought he would be afraid because when I hear him in the spice drawer and walk over to pull it open he scurries away but when I reach he only goes silent for a second and then returns to whatever whirring sounding thing he’s doing and I know it sounds crazy because what does a mouse know about anything but I’m grateful to him for not getting scared and spiriting away.
***
I considered not setting the traps after all but then I saw him.
He was under my armoire holding a flower petal which had dropped off my dead purple orchid which I hadn’t taken out because I felt guilty for not watering it because that’s probably why it died and I didn’t want to throw it in the garbage too because that’d just be adding insult to injury and so he was nibbling one of the blackened petals and I thought my god that mouse is weird and how endearing is that but then he ran across the floor straight in my direction making for my pink Mother Fucking Girl Power socks and I yanked my feet up and he stopped right underneath and looked at me and I mean stared right into my eyes and I felt as though his little inky irises were screws clipped in to the bit of an electric drill and he was going to rotate my eyes out of their sockets through my brain out the back of my head.
I took the orchid out to the dumpster on my way to the grocery store where I bought toasted coconut chips to bait the trap which I positioned in the spice drawer.
***
When I can’t stand myself anymore I go this bar Riptide at the beach town thirty minutes away. They don’t have a draft system and bread their fried snacks so thick that it’s tricky for my tongue to differentiate the food but in the off-season I am the cutest girl there by nature of me not having a middle-aged belly or smelling like an oyster.
Cassandra is on duty which I’m glad about because of the way the rings she wears on every finger clink against the beer bottles when she slides them across the bar top. I get halfway through my first beer and platter of fried shrimp or is it pickles when the first guy under the age of 40 walks through the door and right over to the seat beside me. He spouts the usuals is this seat taken bartender two more PBRs please what’s your name what do you do for work and I decide to try something different and say I write and illustrate children’s books and he replies oh that’s cool uhh I’m in construction and suddenly I am just so tired and I say look your pores are impressively tight but I want to eat my fried dinner by myself do you mind if I sit alone? I’ll buy your next round to be fair. He shrugs and stands up and I congratulate myself for raising my standards but as soon as he settles into his seat at the other end of the bar the heaviness in my stomach spreads to my arms and legs.
I notice the woman from the hardware store the one with the shell pink lipstick sitting at a table in the corner looking at her phone and she’s alone too so I think she’s not a man but she could be a friend. I walk over sit down and say I still haven’t caught my mouse and when she looks up her lips pull apart softly but she doesn’t say anything and I realize the impression she made on me was much bigger than what I left on her so I stand up too quickly and my thigh hits the table and sloshes her coke-based cocktail out of the glass and I say sorry I thought you were someone else.
***
I caught the mouse twice in the night but both times he got away.
The trap door snapping shut woke me up and normally it wouldn’t because I don’t normally sleep in the kitchen but last night I did so I got up and put on latex gloves and opened the spice drawer and somehow the mouse had gotten the trap door back up without me hearing him do it and I thought okay mouse well played and re-baited the trap because of course my mouse had managed to eat the coconut chips and finagle the trap open all in the time it took me the human to snap on her gloves so I lay on top of my sleeping bag and kept the gloves on and when I heard the trap go off again I jumped up and jerked open the drawer and the trap door was still shut so I grabbed the trap and it was amazing how little it weighed like the mouse was maybe not in there so I thought I should check because in addition to cultivating a refined palette and having a tidy way of using my kitchen maybe he also has Houdini skills but no when I opened the trap door there was his little face and I was holding the trap at eye level and he looked at me like not the way that bros do when they walk over from across the bar and say hey what’re you drinking no don’t tell me I bet you’re a cranberry vodka girl but like sweet and soft and twitchy around the eyes like if he could talk he would say, “Hi, my name is Fred, and I noticed you’re reading Cat’s Cradle. I’m crazy for Vonnegut.”
To the bros I would know just what to say gross no you can buy me a bourbon. But to fangirl over Vonnegut with someone I’ve just met—that I don’t know how to do without coming on too strong and being too much and otherwise acting in ways that Cosmo advises against and it’s not that I enjoy Cosmo but there aren’t any magazines for bony girls with myopia so I set the trap back in the spice drawer and Fred walked out, weaved his way through the spice bottles, and left.
***
The last man who froze (He took a whole six weeks to freeze probably because he smokes a lot of pot.) is in aisle 9 comparing bags of dried fruit. I try to back my cart away but it has a squeaky wheel and so he says hello hi there fancy meeting you here because we originally met at the grocery store. I’m in here a lot.
I say hello back because I don’t want to be rude and how have you been and he says I’m glad to see you and I say oh yeah why and he says because I’ve been thinking about calling you I miss you and I’m like what huh none of the ice men tell me that and he says I don’t know what that means and I say nevermind delete that and he says you are the weirdest girl I’ve ever met and I’m like yeah I get that a lot and then he laughs and says that’s not a bad thing and I’m like are you being serious and he laughs again and says dead serious and I say ok well what do you want to do and he laughs and dear god so much laughing but I keep that thought to myself and he says I like you I like you a lot actually but you’re kind of hard to get to know on like a deeper level and I say what the fuck does that mean and he laughs so I say that was a serious use of the word fuck and he clears his throat and says well you aren’t very forthcoming about your feelings and I just stare at him and he says which I kind of get but sometimes you have to share stuff with a boyfriend and I say whoa whoa whoa you were never my boyfriend and he’s like you said yourself after a few glasses of wine that you don’t share anything with anyone unless you’ve had a few glasses of wine and I’m like that’s not true and he says yeah it is you didn’t tell me when your birthday was and I say oh brother who cares about birthdays people forget those all the time and he says ok but you didn’t tell me about your book until I opened the drawer and there was a watercolor of an octopus wearing eight suede booties and I say I don’t show that to people because it’s not in show-able shape and fuck you for snooping and he says okay yes but jesus come on you know what you didn’t tell me and then he says it but I don’t hear him because my brain has been doing me a favor the past year by putting a black box over the mouths whenever they try to talk about ▀▀▀▀▀▀ my sister and the therapist I had for three weeks and the reallyjustfine man’s divorce attorney who calls to follow up on getting my bank account information for the alimony although I’ve told him I don’t want money—my brain redacts the fact that the person with 9.374 years’ worth of me memories and factoids and more insider knowledge than anyone else can wake up the morning after the birthday party I threw him and pack up his heartbeat gather its icicled rhythms into a suitcase the one with wheels the one that’s his favorite shade of green the one that I bought him and on his way out yell your cooking is your spiciest quality! as he rolls the suitcase through the door away from me and yeah he was just fine and well actually kind of an ass but maybe fine is the best an Ice Queen can do and my brain bleeps it all out so that when I wake up in the morning it takes a few moments to remember why my house holds so much stillness—and I wave my hand at the man’s blacked out mouth and say go back to being frozen and push my shopping cart full of coconut chips down the aisle.
***
After I get back from the store I find Fred’s hole behind the radiator under the big picture window that looks out onto the oak with the single low-hanging branch and I get why he built his doorway there because it is my favorite spot in the house too but he can’t appreciate the view from down there so I have been sitting and not going to work and snacking on dry cereal and hydrating on red wine and at first I just had a glass but then I figured what the hell and grabbed the bottle and then another few bottles and I’ve been waiting for him to come out so I can pick him up and show him the tree and the sunlight and the clouds and blow his little mouse mind and tell him about ▀▀▀▀▀▀ because I feel like if I said it into his soft face he would understand.
For hours he stays away so I get all his favorite spices out of the drawer and all the bags of coconut chips out of the cabinet and set them in a row in front of me but that looks like I’ve barricaded myself from him which is not what I want so I put them all in a circle but sometimes fortresses are built in a circular shape too so then I arrange them in the shape of a star.
I sit in the middle of the star of spices and toasted coconut and wait for my mouse to come out from his hole so I can say to him all the things I couldn’t say to the others.
—
About Melanie Pierce
Pierce holds an MFA in fiction from Stony Brook University, where she taught undergraduate creative writing and served as an editor and contributor for The Southampton Review. Originally from Oklahoma, Melanie has lived in Boston, NYC, the Hamptons, and Taipei, Taiwan, and now lives in Kansas City with her partner and dog, Grendel. She is at work on her first novel. You can find Melanie on Twitter and Instagram with the handle @melaniempierce.