Dead Mice in Doorways
Musings on mortality and strange gifts from the universe.
There’s a dead mouse in our doorway. Right in the tiny slither that separates the rotting wooden planks of our garden decking from the dusty kitchen tile; it lies there, somehow just out of reach of being crushed by the door when it’s closed.
The slugs apparently came for it first, I missed seeing this with my own eyes but the criss-crossing of shimmering slime traces their journey across the doormat, and over the glistening wet looking remnants of what was once was warm fur.
I squat, squinting to look closer at the messy biological collage, uncanny valley, textures blending into each other, unrecognisable as their original form. Some parts remain in focus, crisp against the chaos of decomposition - the white skull pokes out, a front paw is perfectly exposed, skeletal; the tail lays relaxed. The metallic green fly that sat in a hollow socket of the skull has given way to tiny maggots, however by the time I look closely they appear deathly still, not wriggling and writhing as I’d expect - perhaps the sun scorched them, dried them out: killed in action, preserved perpetually, death within death, like some quite twisted poetry.
This isn’t the first time in our house that I’ve found something dead in some kind of entranceway. A couple of months ago, I discovered the dusty debris on our windowsill was in fact a dry, decomposed mouse - mostly skeleton, but with the outline of fur and other soft tissue sort of caked onto the dirty peeling paint. It’s a window below street level, looking out into an airy that frequently is filled with leaves, street trash, mud and dirt from rain. The cars rumble by overhead and push occasional gusts of breeze through, which feel refreshing for a minute before you remember how thick they are with pollution. I pushed the window open higher, rattling the frame to get a better look at the universes latest gift, dropped for us like a cat bringing its latest prey. It blends in so well with the caked dust on the sill and discoloured chips of paint, you’d be forgiven for missing that it was ever a separate entity, let alone a being that once lived and breathed. Not knowing what to do, and scraping it off seeming quite an indecent way to handle a body (and also hard to accomplish without damaging it). I decided to leave it, until it is entirely skeleton and hopefully easier to move. And so it remains, pasted outside the window, breeze blowing through the cavities in its tiny skull before making its way into our kitchen.
In my experience, things often happen in threes. When I first moved into my current home, three glass or ceramic objects smashed in close proximity to me: a bowl, a frame, a glass. Then later in the year I encountered three pigeons: one that was sick and needed our help, a second that hit a window and died in my dad’s hands, and a third that hit the window of the coffee shop I was sat in, but didn’t die thanks to an unbroken neck and google’s advice on re-orientating a shocked bird. I’m not sure whether I should also be expecting a third mouse, perhaps in a different doorway, dead or alive. Perhaps, like a cat with kittens, the Universe has decided I no longer need it’s help with hunting, and instead is watching me seek prey on my own two feet.