HANA RIVERS

La Petite Mort

A few years back, Dan's place was overtaken by a mouse infestation. They came in from behind the radiator, scurrying along the walls and leaving behind them trails of black shit. Once in November we came home from that Caribbean place on Nostrand to small mounds of dirt overturned on the hardwood, remnants from the rodents digging in our house plants. The roots of the large satin pothos had been ruined, riddled with bite marks. Dan tossed it unceremoniously into the trash, leaves silvering in the moonlight, on top of a pile of smashed Sapporo cans.

Once while Dan was working a night shift, I came home to find one caught in a sticky trap by the fridge. Its frail body was splayed and motionless, as if flattened, like the ants my brother used to murder with a magnifying glass back in Lansdale. I picked up the trap with a pair of kitchen tongs, stepped out into the hall, and tossed the entire unit into the incinerator, paying no mind to the squeaks.

Dan came home furious. Raised in rural California on his dad's trailer, he was used to more humane methods of disposal; he'd pour cooking oil on the stuck mice, mercifully, and let them run free into vacant campsites. Where am I supposed to do that, I asked. Maria Hernandez? Some kid'll get hantavirus.

***

We broke up a few months later, after I took a job babysitting on the Upper West Side and saved up enough for my own place. Kennedy was nine and her mother paid me thirty bucks an hour to mill her around Central Park and talk to her about my problems.

I thought we were in love, but really, I think I just wanted a companion. Someone to do fuck-all with, you know?

Kennedy nodded sagely from beneath her blonde bangs, too-thick.

Like my friend Jenny, she said, kicking her pink cowboy boot into a thawing piece of March ice. She comes around sometimes but only cause our moms are friends.

Right, I said. Exactly.

***

I used the babysitting money to illegally sublet from Lee, a Columbia student getting his MFA in painting. Rough canvasses lay strewn across our shared apartment, a hull full of half-finished work: all of girls with pink limbs and sordid expressions. They were gazing out of windows, or sitting sullenly in the nude, chin-in-hands.

Lee and I didn't make much small talk, but he didn't mind when I brought women home, fumble-fucking them on the college-mandated twin-XL in my room and sometimes letting them stay for breakfast. With Mary, I made popovers. With Delia, Dutch babies. They always seemed to be impressed by my prowess, but I never told them its source: humid afternoons spent in my mother's kitchen, experimenting with flour and water, watching yeast catalyze rises before my very eyes. Five miles down the road my parents toiled away at the hospital, needling patient after patient; anesthetizing.

***

Since Dan, I'd sworn off love, whatever that was. Mostly, I'd sworn off men. Men could do things for me: provide me with a shoulder to cry on, a body on which to lay my own, large hands equipped with the seemingly innate knowledge of bug-catching and toilet-plunging. I needed men. Thing was, I wanted to be needed by women. If Mary, popover-redhead Mary, ever asked me nicely enough to oil a trapped mouse and free it with some ritual chant by the banks of the Hudson, I probably would. I enjoyed doing things like walking women home, insisting on chivalrous gestures such as door-opening and coffee-paying. But they didn't provide me with the same thereness that men like Dan had, roughened and prone and wanting me. It seemed I was either wanted, or wanting. Never both at once.

***

In the Nostrand apartment, Dan used to put shiny globs of peanut butter on the sticky taps, to further bait the mice. I never understood that, bait on bait. Must've been really powerful, if it could impart the kind of splayed, Greek hero style deaths these mice underwent. They were helpless and struggling until the onset of Dan's mercy, or, some nights, my cruelty.

I didn't care if I was cruel. It was humiliating to be that vulnerable. The last thing I wanted was to die like that: foolishly lured into an overflowing trash bin, listening to the drone of the Bushwick ice cream truck play La Cucaracha, dreaming about all the pussies I'd never eaten. Swear it on Kennedy's life, but that would never be me.

Hana Rivers is a queer, Filipina writer based in Brooklyn. She has a B.A. in English (Creative Writing) from Barnard College, where she currently works as a Post Baccalaureate Fellow, advocating for anti-oppressive pedagogy. You can find her online @__proseb4bros.