The Mice
Casey Flynn
Without eyes mountain walking is difficult. You still have them, they just aren’t working so you lie under a boulder in cold water and wait. Melting snow rushes down your shirt but not your throat and you dehydrate further. Apparitions invite you to die from exposure. They make a convincing argument you can’t remember and you consider taking them up on it.
A man offers you a plastic bottle of hot tea. You’re pretty sure he’s real, the one you sat next to by the fire before it burned out your eyes. Well, your eyes were long gone by then, scorched by snow and wind on the high mountain pass, but the smoke didn’t help. The man also thinks you will die but invites you not to. A mouse runs across your face as you lie there but doesn’t weigh in on the matter of life and death.
With one eye working depth perception by moonlight is shit. You walk with sticks that stab the muddy earth but trip anyway toward cliff edges. Without your sticks you take a tumble and shatter your bones, but with them you have a meager chance to keep your bones intact.
A mouse runs across your food wrapper and you pop your stopper and smash its bones with your sticks. You feel terrible. You wonder if you punctured its eye and if its depth perception will be shit by moonlight from now on. And mice can’t use sticks, as far as you know.
The mouse twitches. Your eye twitches. Your heart twitches, punctured, in the empty wet expanse, until new companions arrive.
With companions mountain walking is easier. They give you their eyes and you see a way around the mountain and out again by way of a town under occupation. First, a roof to rest under with no invitations to die. If there are mice they keep their own counsel. Then the back of a trembling truck as it creeps through a cut in the cliffside. Night advances with each passing guard station until a hushed frigid walk and then refuge, for now. With their eyes, you don’t trip and sprawl dead under broken moonlight.
Without them it’s just a cold wet room filled with incomprehensible questions, ripe for lung fungus, where different modes of darkness crowd in and more than eyes disappear. The opposite of exposure but certainly not an improvement. The mice offer to smash your bones and you wish they could follow through. It’s a thoughtful gesture, really. In the end it’s unnecessary because your companions are still with you, and so are their eyes. You lie down and wait for a bus ride out of here.
Casey Flynn is a Colorado-based writer, artist, and father. His work has appeared in Vallum, Amethyst Review, and Novellum. He is working on a PhD in religion and likes to play with his kids, play outside, and play banjo. Learn more about his work at caseyflynn.com.
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