Mouse Plus Wheel

 When I bought you from the reptile store, they folded you into a lunch bag and stapled down the top. I doubt the part-time employee even cared if your tail got snapped between; you wouldn’t be around much longer. Three dollars and fifty-two cents later, you were mine. The romantic side of me felt compelled to pay for your soul in pennies.

Contrary to the story I spun at the register, I had no pet python at home. Balancing your bag on my thigh on the long drive home, I could hear your fervent scratching in there. I whispered calm things to you, but you did not care.

We arrived home and I opened your bag inside your new home. It took you about four minutes to sniff yourself out of the darkness. You inched around the carnival-themed cage: colorful bedding, a fake popcorn chew toy, slabs of lemon-colored wood, and a rainbow ice cream sandwich box for you to sleep inside. Plus, a wheel: the gerbils who lived in this cage before never used it. They were too busy tunneling.

But you: raised in a closed desk drawer, surrounded by larger and angrier mice; you did not know how to dig, nor what exactly to do, without any other screaming mice there. But your heart knew the wheel, and I heard its hinges squeaking from the other room. Even if you hid when I walked in, I could hear the wheel, all through the night, into the morning. Any time I was out of the room.

Eventually, you would allow me to watch. And then the dog, for you did not fully understand we were predators then. The poodle and I would watch you gallop on the wheel, your feet flying as your legs stretched. There was food and there were toys: globs of peanut butter and a new little hut to climb, but it was the wheel that kept you alive. In the dead of night, I could hear you chugging along; farther and longer than my asthma and I ever could. I called you “a jock” to my friends: no brains, but tons of energy.

It took only a month until we had our first accident.

Adding a new set of tubes to your cage--including a path to another wheel--you were curious about my hands. Normally, you would nip me when I came too close--you were bred to be wary--but as I was closing the top of the cage, you followed my fingers curiously. I did not think you liked me that much.

You were not fast enough: the door snapped shut with your neck wedged between.

Upon the door’s release, you plopped onto the cotton-candy-colored paper. Your wheezing voice scratched cursive around my bedroom. Your white throat red, your eyes twitching. Alive.

You ran to hide: not to your sleeping box, not to the hut, but underneath that blue wheel, smooshing yourself against the sharp plastic: like the wheel was a big brother to protect you from me.

That evening, it was you, me, and Google: researching rodent seizures, children’s ibuprofen, vet advice, signs of demise, and euthanasia options. I dropped a huge dollop of peanut butter into the cage--just in case--and waited around for any clear signs of what to do next.

To reach the peanut butter better, you crawled into the cradle of the wheel. You had become little more than a little glob of panting fur yourself, the wheel hardly rocking under your micro-weight. Eventually, you fell asleep there, rolling like a hammock.

In the dead of night, I checked on you again: hanging your head off the wheel’s edge, your bruised neck swinging loose. I poked it through the bars: you woke and glared at me. When I left, you dragged yourself underneath, like a chick beneath his mother.

Because this is the moment the relationship has been confirmed: you have not been saved, just transferred to a new location, to die a different way. Now surrounded by the bars that crushed your skull and neck: forever swallowed by trauma. The entire point of this was to make your life better, not to elongate it into a different form of torture and death.

It is a strange thing, to love someone so small: to put drugs in the water and extra fluff around the wheel and then go to bed, assuming you’ll be dead by sunrise.

But in the fourth watch of a sleepless night, I hear it: the cranking squeak of a wheel, starting off slow--a few steps.

I get out of bed. Not risking the light of my phone, I rely on the spring moonlight as I yawn and lean over toward the bars. You pay me no notice: your breath is frail, and your legs stretch as you run. Death be darned: you have decided to run.

And there is no wheezing now: the wheel is, step-by-step, breathing life through your crushed throat, in your lungs.

Whatever you are thinking, your eyes are closed. There, you are free from everything.