BROWSE Columns
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Most prominent places in the Pantheon of Phobias are occupied by the fears of the small and insignificant. Fears of the big and unknowns come naturally—no art here. And the phobias that hunted Auntie Mira, an artist with a gregarious soul in her tiny and fit body, were made to measure in all their intricacy of smallness, treated with due devotion to the beauty of details. Her days were filled with the rituals appeasing her fears of aging and obesity, poverty, and sickness.
She ate healthy, never after six at night, exercised daily, and rarely stayed late. She spent most of her waking hours in her atelier, transforming raw materials into imaginative art forms, sometimes jewelry, sometimes sculptures. Her atelier, the hub of her bohemian universe, was frequented by a colorful army of friends and acquaintances; artists would rub shoulders with writers, professionals, or theatre people; everyone was welcome.
When the lights went off, and the darkness stepped in, when the footsteps and voices died away to silence, creatures of the night went out from their hiding to rule until sunrise. The sweet Auntie Mira, an obnoxious giant to them, lived in oblivion to their clandestine presence. She would occasionally vacuum a spider web, or mouse droppings here and there, or wipe dust-like grains off a counter, but she had never faced confrontation. “Oh, that must be awful, just awful,” she’d tell her friends, her naturally deep voice exalted. “Some people have those terrifying creatures with big antennas. Just recently, this woman across the street shattered her wrist at
eleven places—Imagine!—she saw one coming at full speed, so she jumped onto the kitchen stool but miscalculated. What a tragedy! I’d have a heart attack if that happened to me—I can’t even think of it—I would die right on the spot!”
One winter evening before Christmas, when the days were too short, unreasonably gloomy, and perversely bitterly cold, Auntie Mira closed her workshop earlier than usual; a winter blast was in the forecast, and she wanted to get home before it started to snow. She turned the street corner toward the bus stop when shy snowflakes had already begun to appear; she realized she had left her umbrella on the kitchen counter. So Auntie Mira returned. She wished later she hadn’t.
The front door opened to the usual bangs and knocks of its three security bolts. Auntie Mira left the door wide open and hastily entered the dark twilight of the long, windowless corridor ending at the mirrored wall where her study was to its left, opposite the bathroom. She knew her space by heart: ten steps ahead, then three steps to the right to the kitchen. The kitchen light switch was to the left, right by the entry. She casually flipped it on and entered. Nearly instantaneously, she gave out one piercing shriek of terror and collapsed to the loud drum of her heartbeat, startled. Her heavy winter coat and felt hat cushioned her fall.
As Auntie Mira stormed into the kitchen, in the last flickers of her conscious mind, she saw in the broad light, bold in the open, running toward her in unprecedented hurry, the monster of the night—a mouse. It was an ordinary field mouse about two inches long with a uniformly gray coat except for its long and naked tail. On seeing Auntie Mira, the mouse stopped; its black eyes, unfathomed like two beads of hematite, cast a silent but undoubtedly evil curse upon her. That was the moment when Auntie Mira’s recollection ended. The world in her vision spun and floated away, gradually becoming smaller until it completely vanished in a point as though seen through an ever smaller opening of a telescopic shutter—Auntie Mira was devoured by darkness.
When she came about sometime later, neither long nor short time but definitely well before the clock struck midnight, the mouse was still on the floor, no further than a yard away. It looked harmless, motionless, lying on its side, like an abandoned cat’s toy. But Auntie Mira could swear on the Bible that its open eyes followed her every move.
Auntie Mira cautiously rose from the floor, minding not to provoke the mouse with an unnecessary move or sound. “Who knows what else it may do,” she thought, “better to be careful than sorry.” She was about to devise a safe action plan when several loud knocks came from the front door.
“Hello? Anybody home?” A strong baritone asked, “Hello, Miss Mira? Are you there?”
“Here, Rich, in the kitchen!” She answered, taking a step back from the mouse that seemed to grow smaller and less of a threat on the sound of the familiar voice. The middle-aged man in the overalls at the door was the house custodian who lived with his family in the first-floor apartment directly below Auntie Mira’s workshop.
“The Lord himself sent you! Bless you for stopping by,” she said to Rich and rhetorically pointed at the mouse, “Can you explain this?”
“It’s a mouse, Miss Mira, a dead mouse. Let me clean it for you.”
Rich stepped toward the mouse with a definite intention to grab it with his bare hand. Disgusted, Auntie Mira stopped him just in time before the worst had an opportunity to happen.
“Wait!” She ordered him, getting hold of his hand. “Are you certain the mouse is dead?”
“It doesn’t move,” Rich answered. His dark eyes rounded in surprise at the question with such an obvious answer.
“It may be dying of some terrible, infectious disease just before us. It may bite you when you touch it. And you will die soon after in terrible agony. Don’t dare to touch it, please.”
“But, Miss Mira, the mouse is dead, as dead as you and I are alive.”
“It may be as you say. Still, it may carry a plague,” Auntie Mira stated with ominous confidence. “You touch it, and shortly, you will be covered in painful boils, or flesh-eating bacteria will turn your hands gangrenous to be amputated; you will carry the disease to your wife and children, and they will infect others. In no time, the entire town will be diseased; thousands of people will die like flies. Do you really want this to happen?”
“How come—?” asked Rich, a skeptic by nature.
“This happened many times in the history of civilizations, my dear man. Numerous records exist of infected rodents entering port cities and spreading the diseases. No one is immune; no one can be spared!” Her voice quivered.
“So what do you want me to do, Miss Mira?” asked Rich, immune to her oratory and ready to leave at his earliest opportunity.
“Here, please use this,” Auntie Mira answered, opening one of the cabinet drawers to produce a pack of plastic zip-lock bags from its depth.
Under Auntie Mira’s supervision, Rich obediently flipped the bag inside out, and, using it like a glove, he picked the dead body off the floor, flipped the bag again so that the mouse was now confined inside, and closed the zip lock. “No, no,” Auntie Mira politely objected when he tried to put the mouse into his pocket, “please give it to me.” She put the mouse into a small, painted yellow and red metal box left empty after Wedel’s Homemade Candies and placed such an impromptu coffin on the counter.
After Rich left, she brought a sizable bottle of antibacterial wound spray from the bathroom and diligently sprayed every inch of the floor touched by the mouse. Then, still in her coat and hat, she dialed Kaya, her friend veterinarian who worked at the university research lab.
“Of course, you’ve done the right thing,” Kaya assured her, “We can never know. Bring the mouse to us for autopsy first thing in the morning—we will get into the core of the matter.”
Thus, Auntie Mira’s day ended with a deeply gratifying feeling of satisfaction on the deed well done. And with the mouse’s coffin in her purse.
Two weeks went by in the unnerving silence on the lab report. The long wait was finally over a day after Christmas—Kaya called.
“We have the autopsy results back,” Kaya said lightly. “Embrace yourself, Mira.”
“Yes, yes, finally!” Auntie Mira responded with anticipation. “What’s the news? Is it bad? Good?”
“Well, the good news is the mouse was in perfect health. So—no danger of pandemic.”
“Yes?” Auntie Mira asked, slightly disappointed but relieved, “So how did it die?”
“Your mouse had a massive heart attack caused by a traumatic experience,” Kaya carefully weighed her words.
“Oh-my...,” Auntie Mira said quietly after a long silence, “Do you mean I startled the poor thing to death?”
“Aha,” Kaya laughed, “It sure proves you still have your killer looks.”
“It has never happened to me before. I had no idea...” said Auntie Mira sadly.
Sweet Auntie Mira realized they met in the same Pantheon, but the mouse prayed at a different altar.
Bartholomew Lamb is the pen name of a Polish-American mathematician, educator, and emerging writer who lives in Texas. She has written an unpublished collection of 25 short stories and is currently working on her first novel.
