“The Mouse” by Thao Vu
In the dark, thirty pairs of tiny red eyes were staring at her.
Prof X had reminded them to turn off all the lights before they left. “Mice are nocturnal, anyway,” he said, “better save electricity for the heat down here”.
Darkness was choking Hana, her head throbbed as she fought the urge to turn around. “Damn,” she gritted her teeth, “stupid little fucks!” The irrationality surprised her every time. Hana was beyond herself, this stranger she did not know inhabiting within, a small child or a furry animal, completely hypnotized and rendered helpless by the multitude of floating red dots.
She used to scrutinize people for secrets buried deep down that made no sense about them. Not the cute things anyone would snuggle up to during ice-breaking activities and pillow talks. Not the harmless litany of being ambidextrous or born rich, but the corpse, the stench, the faint whistle across the cemetery. How her seven-year-old brain froze at the sight of a rat smashed on cement, a lump of fur and guts flattened out into a pancake. She screamed, the rat’s corpse imprinted shards on her memory. There were no insight and value attached to phobias, the senseless traumas that the brain ceased to process. Like an aborted fetus stashed away in the circuits of her amygdala, Hana buried that black rat three feet below ground in a locked box, threw away the key, and walked away as far as possible.
She kept quiet when Prof X said that the lab credit was compulsory. “The fundamental mechanism of cognition,” basic, he said, reward and punishment, reinforcement, pound it into the mouse’s brain. “Think about your desire and fear, Hana,” he gazed at her, piercing, “The same ropes you’d pull to feed those primal calls.” Drained, she couldn’t mention musophobia, which sounded like a Greek salad dressing.
“I’m getting better,’ Hana convinced herself, “I’m CBTing my way out of this shit.” Two weeks before summer, she managed perfect attendance for a C. Yet the nightmares she could not escape, Hana woke up in cold sweat, feeling mice crawling out of her hair, the pockets on her fleece pajamas.
The mouse was a brainless dimwit resigned to its fate. Electric shocks, water withdrawal, and overfeeding – habitual suffering pushed the creature away from the lever it ought to press. Hana stood by its home, a little shoebox Guantanamo Bay, delivering chain shock in a daze. Endless zaps could not numb the hatred and stress swelling inside her. When other mice had evolved from pushing levers to running mazes, alas, Hana’s mouse only slept and squeaked.
“Here comes,” Hana bit her lips and steadied her gaze.
Her eyes dashed upon rows of tedious fur balls with wet noses, red eyes, and long whiskers pressing into the glass. They lined up, curious, hungry, conditioned to be fed and let out to play. The mice looked up and down in her direction.
“A staggering giant,” they murmured, “what do you want?”
None of them was hers. Hana honed into one morbid box, colder than a long shadow descending.
The mouse’s little body was folding into a nest about the size of her cupped palm, its head and tail curled between the hind legs. The little mouse, it did not bother. Other than shivering, it was as good as dead.
Nothing was coming from the cage, except for disconnected buzzing. The mouse’s entire body was vibrating like a shriek ringing in the void. Hana could not believe her eyes but she knew this posture by heart. For anyone who wished to disappear, anywhere else was better than here.
Limbs over chest, head tucked in, knees up.
Her mouse was afraid of light.
Thao Vu graduated from Eastern Nazarene College (Quincy, MA), National Taiwan University (Taipei, Taiwan), and is writing her debut novel through the MFA program at Virginia Tech (Blacksburg, VA). Her recent and forthcoming work can be found at Bending Genres, BULL, MockingHeart Review, THIMBLE, Villain Era, Zin Daily and at www.vuqythao.com.