ESSAY : Of Mice and Water / Robbie Sugg
As the colder nights set in, it’s no great surprise a mouse had found its way into our nest. It found a breach in the house’s outer shell, and made its way into a bathroom cabinet where there was a slight separation between the faucet pipe and the drywall. We heard it at night, scratching and crunching, and we were mostly relieved we weren’t hearing it in our pantry or kitchen. We had a rather unnerving experience with several mice infesting a previous place of residence, where a family of them had ruined our stash of food and even some clothing, and we wanted to avoid that experience again. We caught a glimpse of the miniscule rodent when it ran out of the bathroom into the bedroom, and it pained us to see this ineffably cute creature just trying to stay warm and fed and watered like any one of us would as the cold moves in. We sealed off the bedroom and attached bathroom, and John set traps for a night using pieces of cheese. The mouse finagled the cheese out of each trap the first night, and we couldn’t help but marvel at its abilities. We switched to peanut butter in the traps for the second night.
There is a sadness in this ritual, of having to rid ourselves of this tiny hapless being. It kindled a yearning in me to be able to communicate across divides– of language and of cognition. If only I could negotiate with this mouse: I would make a tiny house for it in our backyard, I would bring it food and blankets and water if only it could promise to stay out of our pantry, out of our bed, and not poop in the nest we had built for ourselves. And in that yearning was an existential melancholy of such barriers to understanding– between species, between people, between frames of consciousness. We all find ourselves beached here, like it or not, and what a pity that there are instances where we simply cannot be understood, that even as we see another as our own self, we cannot know another truly, as perhaps we cannot even know our self fully.
On the second morning, John went into the bedroom to check the traps and I heard him sigh as they were again empty. But when he went to the bathroom and looked into the toilet, there at the bottom of the gray water was the blurred shape of a tiny mouse who had gotten thirsty. So there, the Universe-in-the-Form-of-a-Tiny-Mouse met its end, or at least the end of its consciousness in that form. It lay there at the bottom of another kind of well, a well that holds life’s waste before being flushed away among so much other refuse.
Many might assume that death by toilet water would be a degradation in that toilet water is often thought of as the lowest form of water. But all water is, practically speaking, miraculous in that it binds all life together, and is indeed a foundation upon which life is built. And in that, I couldn’t help but ponder the banal significance of it, of drowning in something that we cannot live without, in something that forms most of our body’s weight, returning to itself, in a bowl of porcelain which flushes, cyclically, before it is processed at the treatment plant. From there it returns to the river, which remembers its way to the Gulf, needing no reminders. For no water is more sacred than any other, whether in the toilet bowl or the baptismal font, it is the beginning, the end, and the everything in between.
