The Mouse August 1, 2016

After the sad tale of the fawn, I had to deal with the formidable cleanup.  There was blood and guts splattered on the floor, walls, windows, and drapes.  So I geared up yesterday and 3 hours later, following a sequence of scrubbing with detergent, then bleach, and washing the large draperies in my new fabulous galvanized washtub (how lucky that I had purchased it!) and drying them in the bright sun, my studio seemed to be more or less back in order.

But as I began the detox effort, one kind of crazy correlation caught my notice:  on each fawn splatter (for lack of a better word) on the floor, there lay a single little mouse poop.  There were no mice droppings anywhere else.  (Though I didn’t count them or figure out the density, my gut told me that the correlation had to be statistically significant.)  It was as if some little mouse (and generally I don’t even have mice!) came through and tried to counteract the smell with its own scent.

Now that the place is clean, I see no more evidence of a mouse, and I hope it stays that way.  There is only so much mammalian drama I can take!

Late in the day, I went out to look at the fawn’s carcass, and indeed there was almost nothing left.  All that remained, inexplicably, were two beautiful hooves, one from a front leg, and the other from the back, positioned exactly where Casey had laid the unfortunate creature a few days before.