The City Mouse

by Tristan Tomlinson

Outside, the city was awake and full of activity, just as it always is. The sun had already sunk below the horizon and all that remained was faint glow that was fading from the sky; yielding to the cold darkness of a late autumn night. The neon sings had already lit up in windows and now, more and more people spilled out into the streets to enjoy the evening. Inside, while all of this was happening, something else was going out for the night. The apartment was silent, and had been since its tenants had moved out the previous week. It would have been empty, as well, if the people hadn’t accidentally left a box of crackers--unopened--in one of the cabinets. The only illumination came in through the window from the bustling activity of the city, four stories below. The light created irregular spaces of shadow and light inside of the apartment. Into this environment came the apartment’s new inhabitant; its hurried, scurrying footsteps breaking the silence, its very presence shattering the emptiness. Its exploration of its new territory eventually brought the creature to the cabinet, where it found the box of crackers. For many small creatures, the box would have been a difficult to breach barrier between it and its food, but not for this one. The box was speedily broken into and the plastic inside of the box presented no more of a problem than the outer layer of cardboard had. After eating its fill, the creature moved to the edge of the cabinet to survey its vast new domain.

The next morning was sunny and unusually warm for the time of year. With the sun and warmth came another new occupant for the apartment; a young woman. She was of roughly average height and build with long, straight black hair. This was to be her first time living on her own--no roommates and no pets--and she seemed to glow with excitement. A couple of friends helped her to move into her new home, which should have made the process go by quickly, but, in fact, did not. Moving in and unpacking took them all day, as they spent a great deal of time enjoying each other’s company. By the middle of the evening, the job had reached the point where most things were in their new homes, but the boxes ad other packaging materials lay scattered around, making the apartment look like a tiny shanty town after a violent storm. They decided to take another break to eat dinner; instead of going out, they ate in. The young woman had her first dinner in her new home sitting amongst discarded
boxes and newspaper like a homeless person squatting in an old, abandoned building.

After dinner, the woman and her friends collected the torn pieces of newspaper that were laying around and disposed of them, and then they stacked the boxes neatly in a corner of the living room. Once everything as basically in order, the women sat down in the living room to talk…not necessarily about anything in particular, but whatever came to mind. The conversation started off being about how exciting it was for the woman to have her own place to call “home,” but it eventually turned toward the anxieties that she had about the arrangement.

“I’m afraid that I’ll be lonely here on my own,” she said to her friends in a shaky voice. “What if--”
“Don’t worry, it’ll be all right. You know that if you ever need to talk to someone, we’re all yours. And it’s not as if you’re living in the middle of nowhere--we’re all close enough to drop by on each other whenever we want!” on of her friends replied. The other joined in, and together they had their friend back in good spirits by the time that they left. None of them noticed the tiny pair of eyes that had been carefully observing them for most of the day from a small, almost nonexistent crack in the wall…
The day’s excitement must have exhausted the young woman, for she went to bed as soon as her friends walked out the door. She was so tired that she fell asleep without having changed out of her clothes and with hardly another thought about anything at all; excitement and anxiety alike faded away to the recesses of her mind as she gave herself to sleep.

Once the lights were out and the bedroom door was shut, the apartment’s other occupant crept from its lair in the wall. The situation had obviously changed, but it could be dealt with later; food was the first priority. The box of crackers was still in its side cabinet, since the new tenant hadn’t yet gone through every cabinet. After it had sated its hunger, the creature crept around the apartment--just as it had the previous night--to survey its environment. It moved quickly and quietly (it could be very quiet when it wished) from shadow to shadow, becoming increasingly comfortable as time went on. Closed doors didn’t pose much of a problem--except for the bathroom door, the gaps between the bottom of each door and the floor were large enough for the tiny creature to squeeze through. The kitchen, the living room, the bedroom, and the closets were all open to its movements. So too were the walls, as it had already found during the previous night when it made its home in th
e wall in one of the corners of the living room. Before the sun brightened the sky once again the creature invaded the kitched to feed again and then hurried back to its hole in the wall. If there had been a pair of eyes watching, they would only have seen a quick flash of gray moving in the shadows along the edges of the living room, if they saw anything at all. But, of course, there were no watching eyes, so nothing was seen.

Soon after the creature hid itself away again, the woman got out of bed. She had some instant oatmeal for breakfast, showered, dressed, and went out to purchase additional food to stock the refrigerator and cabinets--she didn’t have anything more pressing on her schedule for two more days (Monday) when classes began again. A few hours later, she returned home and started to put the groceries away in the kitchen. In the course of doing this, she found the box of crackers with the hole in it inside one of the cabinets. Of course, she discarded it, but not before noticing the hole that had been chewed through its side. She wasn’t unduly disturbed, but she resolved to keep an eye out--if there was a problem, she had no intention of allowing it to get out of hand so early in her tenancy. The rest of the day passed uneventfully, marked only by a quick trip to the bookstore to pick up a couple of required volumes that she had overlooked. That night, she watched television for a wh
ile after eating dinner and went to bed a little earlier than usual. Her “roommate” had remained hidden all day, sleeping on and off in its hole. Now, when all was dark, it came out again.

She wasn’t as tired as she had been the night before and she stayed awake for a while in her bed. The solitude seemed to force her to feel lonely, and what’s more, to dwell on it. Eventually, though, sleep overtook her, despite her gloomy thoughts. She had slept for a couple of hours when she suddenly awoke. Nothing had disturbed her sleep, she just had habit of waking up periodically in the night, like many other people do. She was wide awake for a moment or two and then she started to fade back into the warm embrace of sleep when she heard a sound. It was a rapid “pitter patter,” like something scurrying across the hardwood floor just outside if the bedroom door. At first, the sound alarmed her, but then it faded away and stopped, leaving only the sound of her own breathing in the apartment. As fast as the unease had come, it went away as her mind turned towards that afternoon and she remembered the hole in the box of crackers. There was nothing to worry about, just a min
or household pest. She’d have to remember to pick up some mousetraps, she thought as she curled up again under the covers.
In the morning, she discovered the creature’s handiwork; it had chewed a hole into the box of cereal that she had bought the day before and made a meal of her breakfast. Some of it, anyhow, but certainly any amount would have been enough to taint the entire box, in her eyes. She threw the box away and made some toast, instead. After that, she went out to get the mousetraps.
Before going to bed that night, she baited, set, and placed the traps in likely places throughout the apartment. The woman went to bed confident that her preparations would end her pest problem.

As had become usual, the creature left its space in the wall and entered the interior of the room once the apartment had become dark and still. Since it had already explored the bedroom and living room, it bypassed these rooms and went directly for the kitchen for its nightly meal. It caught the scent of cheese, and also of peanut butter, and followed it to a cabinet near the stove. The creature worked its way inside and saw the food that it had smelled in plain view. It moved closer, with its nose twitching and its eyes wide open.

The woman woke up at about the same time she had the previous night. She’d had the same trouble falling asleep again. As well--she hoped that that would go away very soon, but it wasn’t all that serious as of yet. Once again, she fell asleep almost immediately, but something different happened a little later. A loud thud jolted the woman into full wakefulness. The sound had come from right outside the bedroom door, and now she could hear the sound of scurrying footsteps that she’d heard the night before. She leapt form her bed, crept up to the door, and opened it a crack with a shaking hand. There was nothing to see until she looked down; a book had fallen off the table next to the door and was laying flat on the floor in front of the door. She replaced the book and went to the kitchen for a glass of water, still a bit shaken up but also amused and a little disgusted with her reaction. Once she’d had a couple of sips pf water, the young woman went back to her room. As she lay in bed, she heard that annoying pitter patter past her door again, receding in the direction of the kitchen.

In the morning, the woman found that none of the traps had been sprung during the night. She didn’t have much time to think about it, as she had a lecture to attend, but it didn’t really bother her that much--perhaps she was a little disappointed, but sometimes it took a couple of days for the stupid things to discover the traps. After breakfast, she left and didn’t return until late in the afternoon. When she got home, she called one of her friends, who was highly amused by her pest problem. The conversation was cheerful and helped make the woman feel better about being alone. They made plans to go out to dinner the next night. Later, she read and returned for the evening, following the routine that she had begun to develop.

Just as she had for the past two nights, she woke up a couple of hours after falling asleep. This time, she heard the scurrying feet almost immediately, but much closer than usual and the sounds were accompanied by what sounded like scraping. It was difficult to pin down the exact source of the noises; it was almost as though they were…coming from her wall! She realized that her “roommate” must have found a way into the walls in her bedroom. Now, it was scrabbling around in the wall behind her bed; the sounds seemed to surround her and press in with the darkness. This continued for some time before the sounds grew fainter as the creature moved towards the door…the woman breathed a great sigh of relief and after a long time, managed to fall into a rewarding slumber.

The morning brought an odd and disconcerting discovery to the tired young woman; every one of her mousetraps had been tripped, all of the bait was gone, but there was nothing caught in any of the traps. There was nothing strange about the defeat of a mousetrap, but six of them, in different places, diffused in one night, with nothing to show for it? It didn’t seem possible, but she was in a hurry and she was tired, so she seized one the logical ideas that there were more than one other inhabitants of her apartment and that they were used to mousetraps--perhaps the previous tenants had used them. In any case, she had more pressing concerns that day and she was meeting her friend for dinner. She left quickly, forgetting to take a pen.
She had a stressful day, with her difficult night, the failure of the mousetraps, forgetting her pen, and having a pair of boring lectures and a paper assignment. By the time she was supposed to meet he friend for dinner, she was drained of energy. Dinner was pleasant diversion, but neither of the women had enough time to savor it and they went their separate ways after hardly an hour.

When she arrived back at her apartment, it was a little after 7:00 and she had to start reading. Normally, she would have found the material engrossing, but she was at the stage of exhaustion where she would read very word on a page and then be unable to recall anything. After a couple of hours of rereading the same chapter, she recognized how fruitless her efforts were and gave up. She turned out the lights and went to bed, as usual. This evening, however, her “roommate” amended its schedule even more; the noises in the wall behind her bed started almost immediately, keeping her from falling asleep at all. It sounded lie someone trying to break through the wall; the scrabbling moved along the wall, almost as though the creature were trying to find a weak point. It was late by the time the noises stopped for the night, but it still took her a long time to fall asleep after the room had become silent--her nerves had been frayed by the constant irritations she had suffered through.

This became a theme that was repeated on subsequent night, with variations. One night the woman would be awake half the night, the next she might awake to hear scratching at the bedroom door. By the sixth night in the apartment, she was in such a state that even though there were no sounds to hear, she was unable to sleep anyway. The next night, she was kept up first by noises from the wall, then by scratching at the door. In the morning, she opened her bedroom door and was confronted by a miniature Siegfried Line of obstructions: a couple of spools of thread, a marble or two, and other assorted items. The constant stress of these nightly happening began to take its toll on her; he couldn’t get to sleep, she was tired all day, and she found it difficult to do work or just relax, even during the day. She tried sleeping at her friend’s place, but it was difficult even there--she imagined something in the walls, or at the door, whose only goal was to torment her.

After two weeks, she gave up--she just couldn’t handle being on her own anymore. Nothing, not even the exterminator that she called, had worked. The same two friends who had helped her move in helped her pack her things and move back out…one of them offered to let her live with her and her offer was accepted. Moving out took almost as long as moving in had, so it was just getting dark outside as they left.

They hadn’t been gone long before he came out of his hole n the wall. No matter how hard she’d tried, the woman hadn’t been able to corner him--he had other places to hide, as well. Now, he ran across the floor into the kitchen to find what he could to eat. There was still part of a loaf of bread on the counter that the women had forgotten about. He began nibbling at the edges of it, his nose and whiskers twitching. When he had finished, there was an odd glint in his eyes as he cleaned his paws and looked down from the counter on what was once again his.

Analysis:

Not all monsters are physically imposing; sometimes, something can be small and seemingly harmless while still having monstrous characteristics. The mouse in this project is, obviously, very small, but that does not prevent it from being a monster. The mouse’s unthreatening stature and apparent normality contrast with its harassing behavior and seemingly directed actions in a way that is uncanny. Additionally, the mouse inhabits liminal spaces and physically transgresses boundaries--and it is unstoppable, despite its modest stature.

Nothing that the mouse does in the story is in the least unusual. People have problems with mice living in their houses all the time, and the mice commonly chew holes through containers to get at food, get into the walls (and often, under floorboards), and knock items over/move small things. At the same time, people are often “creeped out” by these actions (especially the moving of items and the strange noises that the mice make as they run around in the walls or under the floorboards), even though they know what the perpetrator is. Of course, the reaction is not usually as severe as that of the young woman in the story, but the question remains: why do people find these things disturbing? Mary Douglas might answer that people are afraid of contamination; mice often crawl around and live in dirty places and there seems to be a link between mice (and other rodents) and diseases that can affect humans. In short, we fear that mice will contaminate our homes with the filth and
diseases that they often carry. This is a very real fear, but it is not enough to make mice into monsters--they are small, cute, and people sometimes keep them as pets. Other factors make humans dislike mice that the story uses to portray the mouse as monstrous, as well.

Mice do not live out in the open; they live in hidden places that are often hard for humans to find/access at the edges of human habitations. The mouse in the story lives in a hole in the wall in one of the corners of the living room. According to Douglas, “margins are dangerous,” (Douglas 121) and the position of the mouse at the margin of the living room appears threatening--it does not dwell entirely outside or entirely inside of the apartment. Furthermore, it uses this location as a starting point for its expeditions into the interior of the apartment and then retreats back to the margin once it has carried out its business on “the inside.” The mouse not only lives on the boundary, but it has the ability (which it uses) to move to the inside of the boundary and then retreat back at will, making it difficult to categorize or contain the creature. In addition to living in a marginal space, the mouse in the story finds other boundaries to skirt. When it travels through the living room, it runs along the edges of the room in the shadows where it is difficult to differentiate the creature form the wall/darkness. After the mouse discovers the mousetraps that the woman sets out, two obvious transgressions of boundaries occur. The mouse finds a way to get into the walls of the woman’s bedroom and then proceeds to move around inside of the walls behind her head, which keeps her awake night after night. The mouse, again, is neither within nor without the room, but it is, effectively, assaulting the ultimate physical boundary of the apartment--the wall is an internal boundary, as it separates the bedroom (a place that is intensely personal) from the rest of the living space.

Why do we find transgressions of boundaries, such as those perpetrated by mice, threatening? Clearly, a mouse is not going to knock down a person’s bedroom door, unhinge its jaw, and swallow the person whole. So, is it the idea of what the boundary transgression might represent that is frightening, or is it the transgression itself? Noel Carroll argues that, concerning a work of art that is meant to inspire horror, the reader (or audience) is horrified by the ideas of the fiction, not by the fiction itself (Carroll 56). In the context of the story, this argument can easily be extended to cover monsters, as well as general horror, in that the fact that the mouse lives and runs around in the apartment’s walls is not, on its own, frightening. The mouse’s behavior only becomes monstrous because we see the walls as boundaries in a broader context--they provide security, both literally and figuratively (at a societal level), from things (and people) that are not welcome inside. Carroll’s argument ties in almost seamlessly with a point that Ruth Simpson makes in an article on social constructions of safety and danger. Simpson states “safety zones, therefore, are human constructions--areas we define as free of danger, even though it is impossible to establish this for certain” (Simpson 551). Walls, such as those of the apartment in the story, are human constructions that are supposed to create a zone of safety (whether that zone is within or without depends on the type of construction). Simpson also writes that “Safety, ironically, may be a more uncertain and unstable state than danger: in safety there is always the possibility that danger lurks unseen” (551). The human fear of boundary transgressions that Douglas points out and describes, therefore, has a great deal to do with uncertainty over whether or not we are actually safe; it is unclear whether or not the boundaries are actually creating a safe zone because, as Simpson points out, “danger is often unobservable” (551). These ideas apply to the effects of fiction on readers, as well. In the story, the mouse making its home and traveling inside of the walls of the apartment creates fear for the reader because of the idea of the subversion of a human construction that is meant to create safety (just as Carroll argues, the idea of the fiction is what is horrifying). One could argue that this undermining of a social construction of safety is another reason that some people are afraid of mice (and human house burglars).

The story in question does not only make use of the marginal nature of mice in general to make its mouse into a monster. It takes common actions of mice and plays around with them to create an uncanny creature--something that seems familiar to us, yet at the same time seems strange in a way that is difficult to recognize (Freud 195). The main factor that makes the mouse uncanny in this story is the timing of its actions. The actions of the mouse are normal; it is the fact that the mouse’s activity begins to focus on the woman only after she sets out the mousetraps that is strange. Having a trigger for the actions of the mouse creates a sense of direction and planning in the mouse’s actions, which in turn makes the mouse uncanny (since it should not be able to create and execute plans to torment a human being, if it is a normal mouse). Susan Stewart states “…we might expect that this form [horror] operates by a manipulation of narrativity itself, that its common effect works through the possibilities offered by information unfolding in time” (Stewart 33). If someone were to hear a mouse moving about in the wall behind their bed, they would probably be annoyed (and perhaps a little disturbed by the nature of the noises, as well), but not unduly distressed. Insert an action on the person’s part just before this event, like placing a bunch of mousetraps around the house, and the person’s feelings will probably be somewhat different. There would be an element of uncanniness that would be absent if the order of events were reversed. Why? There would be uncertainty (maybe not much, but some) over whether or not the sequence of events was a coincidence.

Another main factor in making the mouse uncanny is the mouse’s stature. It does not seem right that something so small and cute (filthy and disease-ridden or not) should be able to frighten a person to the extent that the mouse in the story frightens the woman living in the apartment. This goes along with the idea that a mouse should not be able to make a plan to terrorize someone and then proceed to systematically carry out the plan. Humans have frequent encounters with mice; we see them, we sometimes have them as pets, and sometimes our pets catch them. We may often see them as being impure, but we never see that as something that they purposely aspire to be. To humans, mice are small, cute, unintelligent (relatively speaking), unintentionally threatening, nuisances. They are everywhere, and they do not pose any direct, physical threat to humans. In the story, the mouse has a normal appearance (small and gray, with whiskers), but it seems to be mounting assaults on the woman in the apartment. There is no physical reason that the mouse should be able to affect the woman in the way that it does--it is too small (and it has no fangs or venom) to actually harm her physically--but it is unstoppable. She is unable to either kill the mouse or stop it from tormenting her, even though it is tiny--eventually, it forces her out. The uncanniness of the mouse combines with its status as a marginal creature (which repeatedly transgresses boundaries) to create a monster that is small, not large and imposing.

Works Cited
Carroll, Noel. “The Nature of Horror.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Volume 46, Issue 1 (Autumn, 1987): 51-59.
Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. New York: Routledge, 1966.
Freud, Sigmund. Writings on Art and Literature. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997.
Simpson, Ruth. “Neither Clear nor present: The Social Construction of Safety and Danger.” Sociological Forum, Volume 11, Issue 3, Special Issue: Lumping and Splitting (Sep., 1996): 549-562.
Stewart, Susan. “The Epistemology of the Horror Story.” The Journal of American Folklore, Volume 95, Issue 375 (Jan.-Mar., 1982): 33-50.

 

 

 

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