Living in a horror movie, one day at a time

Eight months ago

Bullshit, I thought. No way. I've prepared for this. There is no way this could happen.

But there it was, plain as day, staring me in the face. Not literally in the face. Figuratively in the face. If it was staring at me in the face, I'd have horked up my lunch by then.

Then there's the pathetic fallacy, given the word "staring". Mouse shit can't stare. It has no eyes. I has no nose, mouth, ears. It just sits and performs the verb to be. It is. It has no functions. It is the result of a function. Of a cheeky little bullshit mouse running around a kitchen countertop, shitting its merry away around my toaster, dishes, frying pans...it skips and jumps and pirouettes using its ass as the worst pez dispenser in the world. 2 years of my living in one place, brought to pieces within 30 seconds.

It wasn't just the mouse shit on my counter that gave me pause.

It was the evidence that it had come and gone, and would come back.

There in the corner, where the counter was flush against my stove, was a bottle of cooking oil. The label had been partially scratched off. Little flakes of the label were gathered in front of the bottle in an almost ritualistic fashion. It had tried to claw its way into the bottle. It had left an offering of paper and grease, at the doorstep of Ma Canola. It wasn't cute. It wasn't a gift.

It was a message.

If there is a mouse god up there - sitting atop a throne made purely out of peanut butter, making little noises as he is attended to by tiny squeaky concubines tend to his every whim - he is the John Carpenter of human home infestation. As we all know, some of the best horror fiction (whether film or prose) thrives on atmosphere. Actually seeing Rosemary's baby is never the point. The point is the allusion to the fact that she may or may not be Beelzebub's baby mama (spoiler alert: she totally does. They didn't call it Rosemary's "Unfortunate" Fall Down Some Stairs While Her Husband Looked On), with evidence pointing towards either the affirmative or the contrary throughout the movie. The Turn of the Screw may be a slightly overrated short story with an ending that at least spurred the invention of Child Services, but the story keeps the reader on edge constantly. The payoff for successful horror or suspense usually isn't seeing the monster itself, but the little traces of the monster the reader or viewer sees along the way. This is crucial, for when we actually see the monster, the payoff is greater.

I had a small, furry, disease carrying monster in my apartment that I wouldn't be able to see because it's too quick, knows corners of the building I'll never see, and whose poop can kill.

Killer poop. It doesn't help that the poop looks like charred rice. Easily picked up by a sponge. Transferred to a plate. Food also transferred to a plate. Soon enough, you're dead, and there's a mouse having a belly laugh over your bloated corpse as his kids use your eyesockets as washtubs.