Ratoncito

He visited last night. El Ratoncito. I didn’t feel him when he came, he must have been too small, too nimble, or too magical. But he visited last night, and I’m unsure how to proceed. E. is still asleep, completely oblivious. I can’t wake her, not yet. How am I going to explain it? There’s a hefty lump under the pillow, but I’m too scared to look. Why did I put my broken tooth under the pillow? Now I have to deal with whatever that fucking mouse left me. It’s been at least 15 years since I lost my last baby tooth. My parents always slipped a dollar or two under my pillow while I slept, and claimed the mouse left the money. Unbelievable, even at 10 years old they couldn’t fool me. But I broke my tooth on a small, metal bit in our chicken last night, and I thought it’d be funny, nostalgic even, to put the tooth under my pillow. E. laughed at the gesture; she found it endearing. But now there’s a god-forsaken lump under my pillow and no one else could have put it there. E. wasn’t the type to prank me, no way. I’m freaked out. If a thief snuck in during the night, they’d have taken our TV, or my wallet on the bedside table, or E.’s purse on the dresser. But everything’s where we left it. In the living room, in the bathroom, the front door, the back door, the windows, everything is untouched. I’m dumbstruck. I slept right through it. The morning light is coming in through the blinds, E.’s going to be up soon and I’ll have to explain this. First, I have to see what it is, right? My hands are on the pillow, but I just can’t. There’s no way whatever’s under the pillow is going to be good. It feels like money. Not just one or two dollars, but several thousand dollars. My stomach drops at the prospect. Delirious, I finally rip the pillow off the lump, and it falls onto the floor. An unceremonious reveal.

“What is that?”

E.’s up, her face is still puffy with sleep. Maybe I can pretend she’s in a dream. But I’m nervous, I can only stammer out a few incomprehensible words. I’m not sure of what I meant to say. My heart pounds against my chest plate; knock, knock, knocking to be let out. She’s staring at me with her adorable half-shut eyes. Then she takes another look at our newfound treasure.

‘Where did you get that!?’

Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit. I have to be honest. The words are stuck in my throat, a jammed gun at the scene of a crime. I mumbled something out about the mouse, about last night, about what my parents had told me. She doesn’t say anything, but her face hardens. She mulls it over and bombards me with questions:

‘DID YOU STEAL THIS???’

‘THE TOOTH FAIRY MOUSE YOUR PARENTS MADE UP???’

‘ARE YOU INSANE???’

to which all I can muster is: ‘No, yes, no.’

She’s not going to believe me. But her frustrated veneer cracks and she starts laughing. I’m panicking and she’s laughing. And she keeps laughing, so much so she’s doubled over on the bed with tears streaming from her eyes. After a minute, she composes herself. I’m not laughing, I can’t laugh. When she realizes, her face snaps back into confusion.

‘You’re serious.’

I nod my head.

Together, we count the money. I slept on four $10,000 stacks of crisp $100 bills. We can’t contain our initial excitement. Dreaming of the tantalizing ways the money could change our lives. We discuss our options:

1. Keep the money. Accept it as a gift from the universe and spend the cash meticulously. We don’t want to end up on some IRS watchlist, indignant that we committed no crime. The all-seeing eye of our governmental overlords casting suspicious glances at us for the rest of our unwealthy lives.

2. Go to the police. No thank you.

3. Create the ridiculous, hair-brained plan a 5-year old would conjure up, and share with his parents in a self-congratulating rant.

When I have to make adecision, regardless of the stakes, I pace. The stakes do, however, affect the rhythm of that pacing. This philanthropic mouse and his generous gift have me speed walking from one wall to the other. I’m racing myself to a solution but I’m losing, so the only feasible plan is option three. E. hasn’t moved in 20 minutes. She freezes when a decision looms over her, retreats into herself. Outside we hear  car doors slam, and muffled voices sharing professional greetings. I freeze too, and the look we exchange guarantees that we’re both thinking the same thing. Neither of us go over to look. The voices continue, rising and falling in their volume. E. can’t resist. She peeks out the through the blinds for a split second and gasps. The neighbor called the police.

For the plan to work, E. needs to knock one of my teeth out. She refuses. But she has to, we’re out of ideas. She says she can’t. I urge her to think of something, anything, that I’ve ever done that frustrated her enough to hit me. She says there’s nothing. It won’t be long until the police or the neighbor are at our doorstep, asking probing questions. They’ll be concerned, inquire about the safety of our belongings. We’ll have to lie. We’re atrocious liars. Exasperated, she finally agrees to punch me. We stand face to face and she lines me up. Me, naked save my briefs; her, naked save one of my t-shirts that fits her like priestess robes. She winds up her fist, closes her eyes, hesitates, and lunges forward with her entire body.

‘FUCK!’

‘OW!’

On contact, we both wince. I turn and grab my face; E. shakes her hand furiously. The blood from my lip mingles with the blood from her knuckle. Pain. She asks if it worked with tears pooling on her bottom eyelids. My tongue runs along my teeth and I taste our blood. They’re all still in there, stubbornly attached to my face. She’s not hitting me again, we need another way. Again, we retreat into ourselves to think.

‘Hey maybe –’

‘Absolutely not.’

She read my mind. Back on our bed, arms crossed, brows furrowed, she radiates stern beauty.

‘We have to.’

I read aloud the results of a Google search from my phone:

“Unless under extreme circumstances, a permanent adult tooth shall NEVER be extracted by anyone other than a licensed professional in a professional clinic. At home,removal may lead to infection, further damage to remaining teeth, severe pain, and in some cases, death.”

‘This is an extreme circumstance,’ she declares.

Now’s not the time to argue. I don’t want to lose all my teeth and die. But we also need to rid ourselves of this money. Our plan screeches to a halt. Despite my pleading, E. won’t budge.

Knock, knock, knock. Petrifying knocks.

Knock, knock. Neither of us moves. We hold our breath. A minute passes. E. steals a glance out the window and spots our neighbor returning to his house. He’s a friendly man, our neighbor. Old, living alone. A few times a year, he’ll invite us over to a barbecue. Sometimes we go, sometimes we don’t, but he always asks. We know he enjoys having us around. E. stares at me.

‘Fine. I’ll do it.’

E. is a collector. She stores every item with any amount of emotional significance. Like a squirrel, she stashes away photos, movie tickets, trinkets, postcards—that anything from her life that’ll stave off the forgetfulness of seasons passing. In a small jewelry box tucked away in our closet, her baby teeth are individually packaged and dated with the day she lost each one. Her mom, too, is sentimental. Carefully, she pulls out her treasure and carefully inspects each baggy. She looks for a tooth that carries little enough significance so we can offer it to the mouse. After some deliberation, she finally picks one.

“August 2008”

I wonder why she chooses that one, but she refuses to discuss her methodology. Fine, I don’t push the matter. For the rest of the day, we avoid leaving the house. Anxiously, we wait for nightfall. We submit ourselves to the torture of checking our phones every so often, a compulsion that only pisses off  Time, and the seconds drag on, slower after every tap of the Home button. But the sun finally crawls into bed behind the mountains. It’s time.

Back in bed, we move like robots, we barely speak. All we can do is look at each other with eyes wild with hope and desperation. It’ll work out. This misunderstanding will pass, the mouse will take the money back to wherever he stole it from, and tomorrow we’ll go back to work. Nothing this farfetched could really derail our lives, right? Arrested and tried for burglary, rotting away in prison, ripped apart from each other. Completely inconceivable. We are good people: we love each other, we shop local, we mingle with friends, we donate money whenever we can. It’ll work out. I place the tooth under my pillow, and E. washes her face and settles into bed. No need to disrupt our nightly routine, any hint of fear might alert the mouse that we’ve been scheming. In the dark, we lay in bed and stare at the ceiling.

‘I can’t sleep.’

‘E. you have to!’

‘But what if we sleep through it, you didn’t even feel him last night.’

She brings up a good point. We can’t risk sleeping through another visit and being shackled with more money. We have to sleep, I explain, otherwise the mouse won’t come. As a child, my parents warned me that , , I wouldn’t get any money if I stayed awake They were right. The couple of times I stayed up,  feigning sleep, no one ever came. We need to be asleep for this to work. Neither of us is tired, but what choice to we have? Tossing and turning, we both eventually drift off.

He came. In the middle of the night; he actually came. The barely discernible rustling under my left ear wakes me up. I got him. Without a second thought, I slap the pillow away. But he’s not there. The tooth is gone; the money we didn’t dare touch is still there, but he’s not. Instinct grabs me by the scruff of my neck and I leap out of bed, without thinking to wake E., scrambling around like a madman looking for this demon mouse when I hear a clack come from the living room. I run over, still half-naked and half-asleep, and can’t believe my eyes. There in front of me, cut into the baseboard, is a tiny wooden door about six inches tall. That door did not exist before. Unsure of how to proceed, I lower myself down until I’m on all fours, eye level with this magic door. What the fuck. Gently, I push it open with my index finger, and it gives way to a pitch-black opening. I won’t fit. He escaped in there, I’m out of luck. I do the only thing I can think of and reach my hand inside. Then, my entire arm. Emptiness. Then, my shoulder, followed by my head and my other arm, until I can push my entire body in through the implausible entrance to the mouse’s lair. Now, I stand up and reach out but touch nothing. This space is devoid of light, expansive, and frankly, impossible. My head spins but I have to go on, so I start walking.

* * *

Our hero, fearful but resolute, ventured into the world between the walls. This world was expansive, a never-ending liminal space no living being was permitted to enter. El Ratón, the wise, old keeper of teeth and treasure, ruled this world with a watchful eye. Anyone who trespassed into his dominion faced harsh punishment. But our hero wandered through the dark, thinking he should return the money he felt was wrongfully attained. And he wandered through the void, practicing his lines, crafting the perfect explanation for El Ratón. He’d surely understand, for the mouse was not evil. Life would return to normal. The events of Today would serve as a funny story for our hero and his partner, E., to share with their kids and laugh. The world smelled of mildew and dust, and its emptiness suffocated our hero. He trudged along until he came to an enormous door adorned at its center with a singular gold tooth. His lair.

The door was heavy, and our hero heaved with all his might to push it open. When he realized his strength would never suffice, he simply knocked. A moment passed, and the door opened.

Cavernous, a circular room whose shelf lined walls ascended beyond what the eye could see. On the shelves, an infinite number of teeth, each stored in their own small glass jar packed tightly together. El Ratón stood in the center, hunched over a workbench illuminated by two burning torches on either end. Our hero called out to him but the mouse did not turn to face him. Again, our hero called out,  more forceful this time as his patience wore thin. Again, he was ignored. Our hero walked to the center of the room, angry at the apathetic mouse for his unnecessary meddling, for his arrogance, and for his own ignorance which brought on this entire debacle. Still,the mouse paid him no attention, even as our hero stood right behind him. In a final act of courage, our hero placed his hand on the mouse’s shoulder. In one swift motion, he was knocked to the dirt floor by El Ratón. At last, our hero saw his face: beady black eyes and a pink nose with a snout that made him look cunning and ominipotent. Behind the mouse, on the workbench, lay E.’s baby tooth in an unsealed jar. Just as our hero opened his mouth to speak, El Ratón stomped firmly on his chest. Confused, our hero attempted to pry the mouse’s foot off, but the blow sapped his strength. El Ratón reached behind him and picked up a sewing needle the size of a knight’s sword in this world between the walls. Realizing what was coming, our hero cried and begged for mercy. But the mouse ignored him.

The last image of S.’s life: El Ratón towering over him, raising the needle above his head until finally driving it into our hero’s heart. As his life quickly slipped away, our hero caught one last haunting sight of the mouse’s face. Not once betraying even a hint of emotion, El Ratón climbedback on his workbench, and sealed E.’s baby tooth away.