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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She hoped that the mouse didn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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 … Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2406","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiction"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pa867U-CO","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2406","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2406"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2406\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2407,"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2406\/revisions\/2407"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2406"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2406"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2406"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"