The Paw of a Mouse is Called a Hand by Nora Esme Wagner

My dad texts me—we have a mouse in our house!!!—then a mouse emoji with an elegant coat of white fur and menacing red eyes, like Perler Beads. There are no visible mice in my freshman residence hall, and no functioning radiators. To restore feeling to my body, I lay under heavy sheets, a duvet, two throw blankets. I am a package of poultry plunged into cool water, thawing.

I communicate with my family over text. If we call, their voices sound woolly and distorted. Instead of their faces, I picture tidy ovals that follow the rule of thirds, a composite of many people. In reality, only my mom’s face is longer than it is wide. The rest of us are perfect circles, copy-and-pasted.

I can’t sleep! Dreamt of mouse paws on my face, my mom texts.

The word “paws” feels feline, not rodent. I Google “what do you call mouse paws?”

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On a list of everything that I miss, the mouse is only the first item.

My sister’s best friend converts into a sweet, leggy boyfriend.

She attends her first Halloween party, thrown by the younger brother of a girl in my grade, and texts me photos of a basement I have been inside. She is wearing dark makeup that makes her big eyes explode. My sheer, delicate dress, with loose straps.

My mom signs one publishing contract, then another. They celebrate at our favorite French restaurant, with roast chicken and bread salad, carafes of Cabernet. In the pictures they send me, their mouths are shiny with grease, their exposed teeth scrubbed red, like a plaque stain test.

There is a muggy April heatwave. 

My dad learns new recipes. Caprese pasta, with angel hair noodles, cherry tomatoes, and marbles of mozzarella. Crispy tofu cubes on soft beds of rice. The secret, my dad texts me, is to toss the tofu with cornstarch.

I eat yogurt for most meals; it cools my tongue like aloe to a burn. My minifridge is filled with pots of Chobani, and occasionally, a tub of lemon dill hummus. The spoons I steal from the dining hall have yogurt crusts from the times I forgot to rinse them. Their white stomachs remind me of orcas.

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We have eviscerated the mouse, my dad texts. His war strategy: Nutella bait, a dozen wooden snap traps, and caulk to plug all small entrances. Eventually, he paid an exterminator $2,275. He says that he’ll miss the nocturnal scratching, like white noise. Not. The semester is almost over, and I feel sad, knowing that the mouse came and went.

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Returning from the airport, my dad asks if our neighborhood seems strange. I say, no, not once I’m here. Scaling a hill, my back flattens. I don’t remember this nearly vertical street, with houses too huge and modern for San Francisco. 

I sleep on a pull-out couch because my sister has colonized the bedroom we used to share. Above her bed hangs a new photograph, The Kiss by the Hôtel de Ville, once mine. Hôtel de Ville is soupy and gray, as if shot through smoked glass. But the man’s hand is crisp and massive, gripping his lover’s shoulder forcefully, like she is a memory that he must hold onto.

My second night back, I hear a noise that I assume is leaves, or wind tapping on the wall. When it repeats ten minutes later, now animal-like, I open my eyes. The couch compresses beneath me. I don’t turn on the lights, waiting for a hand to touch.

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NORA ESME WAGNER —  Nora is a sophomore at Wellesley College. She lives in San Francisco, California. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in JMWW, Wigleaf, Milk Candy Review, Ghost Parachute, Lost Balloon, New World Writing Quarterly, Moon City Review, 100 Word Story, Bending Genres, and elsewhere. Her work has been longlisted for Wigleaf’s Top 50. She is an assistant fiction editor at Pithead Chapel and the Prose Editor for The Wellesley Review.

Art by AMANDA YSKAMP — Amanda is a writer and a collagist. Her artwork has appeared in such magazines as Black Rabbit, Riddled with Arrows, and Stoneboat. She lives on the 10-year flood plain of the Russian River, teaching writing from her online classroom and serving as a librarian at the local elementary school.