Mousetrap

By Suzanne Cope

She awoke to the sound of metal hitting wood followed by the faintest of sighs. She lay in bed, awake now, and, aware of the fan humming and the weight of a body a few inches to her left, she tried to focus her mind on the origin of the noise.

She remembered then that she had seen a mouse running across the kitchen floor during dinner. She had screamed and dropped the spoon with which she was feeding their baby, and he had muttered that now he had one more thing to take care of. She picked up the spoon and threw it in the sink and grabbed a clean one out of the drying rack. Oh, like put food on the table, she responded. She had, in fact, bought and made dinner that night, like most nights. Facts she pointed out as their yelling grew in decibel. The baby started crying loud enough that they had to raise their voices even more to make themselves heard.

He pulled out the snap traps and sheets of sticky paper from under the sink, vestiges from the on-going rodent war they had been waging, financed through her calls to their landlord.

Not there, she said, lifting the crying child from the high chair as he pulled the backing from a sheet of sticky paper, the boy can get to it.

He huffed, well then you move it, and then kicked at the snap trap he had just set so that it detonated.

Later, when he went out with a handful of change to buy a loosey from the bodega up the street, she moved the traps far enough under furniture that her son’s curious hands couldn’t grab them. She was asleep by the time he returned.

It was the snap of a trap that had woken her, she realized, one that she had tucked against the wall like the exterminator had told her to. And that last sigh was the sound of life leaving the body now broken in two.