Who was going to pick up the dead mouse drowned in a paint bucket left upright by mistake full of rainwater and catkins was always clear.
Though my mother pretended it was a familiar task that I should not shy from, being eighteen, I could see her eyes fidgeting, glancing, which meant the retrieving of the mouse was no small thing. So I pinched the tail with thumb and two fingers and like a sunken ship raised by a winch, brought it up slowly into the air without a wriggle, spasm or twitch.
My mother looked away to the west as if drawn by some important bird but the trees were empty, her jaw set in a clench that would have broken branches, hands trembling from the daily grief, darkness and depression that surrounded her.
She hoped that the mouse didn’t have young that would be lost, she said, but I had become old enough to know that she was no longer speaking about a mouse.
Jeff Burt lives in Santa Cruz County, California, with his wife and a July abundance of plums. He grew up in Wisconsin, Texas, and Nebraska, and found a home in California, the the Midwestern landscape still populates his vision.