October: the season of death and growing darkness—perfect for a gothic soul like mine. How strange that such things should hold such fascination, that horror is in some sense desirable, as if life would be incomplete without it.
I once saw a cat playing with a mouse in my driveway. The cat, lying there like a lazy sphinx, would push the mouse around with her paw, before listlessly shoving it away. The oddity of it was that the mouse would then run back into her weird embrace, to play the game all over again. I remember wondering if the mouse, perhaps, was a reincarnated human, stuffed into a mouse body for sins committed in a past life. “Kill me,” he seemed to say, as if with delight.
There was a scientific study of the effects of cats on rats. Apparently, their testicles swell up like a little pink balloon. I’ve always found that profoundly interesting. Anyway, when I returned to the driveway a little later, the mouse was dead. Curiously, his brain was laying beside his body, perfectly in-tact, a little fleshy cord connecting it into his ear. I had the distinct impression that the cat had left it as a gift. Or at least as something to be admired.
The story presented here is from a gem I found in Eighth Day Books, a collection of short horror stories titled There Once Lived A Woman Who Tried To Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby, by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya. With such a title, what little mouse could pass by in the growing darkness of October?
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