Wendy E. Braun – This Existence

By: Wendy E. Braun

The Starlings moved into the kitchen wall over a month ago, and I couldn’t help feeling like they belonged there, my apartment a testament to what would have been, been careful not to wake them when brewing breakfast. I had felt that way about the mice until I opened the cabinet last Sunday and found an army of mice or evidence of the stench of them. The Starlings can stay, but as in all good tales…

I laid out bricks of poison the way the government hands out welfare checks and minimal benefits. We all die with full bellies in the end and are angry for the expense of cleaning up the waste.

In my twenties I cried when my roommate trapped a mouse, its small grey paws glued to a tray like tar on a desert road. Black eyes wide, rounded ears white lined with pink veins, sound pulsing through the fragile frame. She caught me trying to apply grease to its paws and promptly placed it into a plastic bag to ensure the last breath. You see, she had gone after it with an umbrella, which I could never understand, or why it was the problem when the roaches had been the ones to spoil the fruit in the basket, and it was the Bronx, and we were still young.

Yesterday my neighbor scored a raccoon with marshmallow bait, and now its law to end it all owned land equaling a general lack of relocation. Somewhere inside my walls, the mice are dying, and raccoons with bellies full of sweets rot, and thank god for the Starlings wings, and pray that the landlord doesn’t care as he cares little for the mice. But save me from the dreams where the stinkbugs cover my eyes and my mouth, because they are the only ones that I know how to get out, and don’t we just want to get out, all of us out.