Florida Cormorant
She lived in her apartment for eight years without a problem before it happened. All she remembered about that day was that she was alone and in the kitchen. In her memory, she was getting ready to leave for somewhere, possibly to visit her parents out in the country, but that could have been a figment. The reason she believed she was going to her parents house that night is because if she had to sleep in the apartment, after the incident, she would have been upset about it. She remembered knowing that she could escape, and feeling grateful for it. She also remembered talking to her mom and saying— I’m so glad I’m not there tonight, so glad I’m here instead. She was thinking about it as if it was much more than it was but there were philosophical reasons for that, reasons she was trying to get to.
When it happened, she was standing in her kitchen, cleaning up as usual—whenever she was in the kitchen she was cleaning. At that time, the garbage pail was still in the cabinet under the sink just as it was when she grew up. When we get used to certain things she thought, certain patterns or observations, they tend to remain in our lives—they become a part of our structural existence. So, she was in the kitchen and opened the cabinet door, just like she’d done hundreds of times before, to throw something away, but this time a small mouse came flying out. She screamed and leapt back causing a pounding on the floor that must have scared the mouse and changed its trajectory back to the dark cloak of the cabinet. She immediately shut the cabinet door and put something heavy in front of it. She then mopped the floor ferociously.
Now, she knew this seemed like an insignificant story and it absolutely was. But, there was a specific part of it, a part that related to that structural existence aspect she’d poked at earlier, a part that made her wonder about herself. After the day of the mouse, she opened the cabinet doors below her sink only three more times. Once to remove the can and clean the space where it was. She would never again place her garbage can under the kitchen sink. The second time, it wasn’t her who opened the cabinet but the exterminator she called to lay the poison. A poison that would keep her up at night questioning the existence of humanity for decades. The third time ,it was her partner who opened the cabinet—she’d assured him that she knew the smell of death and that death was wafting out from beneath the sink. When he opened it, semi unwillingly and with a roll of his eyes, the same rebellious mouse was splayed out right next to the door and its limp little body rolled out before her partner was ready. This caused her partner to pull back in surprise and it caused her to run to the other room and close the door. It is possible that after coming to some sort of cynical resolution with the death, the woman opened the cabinet one more time to vacuum and bleach the whole thing and throw out any unnecessary materials now contaminated. That said, it’s been three years since that moment and the cabinets under the sink are the only real storage space for pots, cleaning solutions and other items that shouldn’t be kept visible but the woman hasn’t opened the cabinets since. The doors were sealed shut, as if they no longer existed, and the entire space has been dissolved of its purpose or any purpose for that matter. She didn't know, but she didn't think this was what most people would have done. Although her partner had never mentioned the use of the cabinets—its possible that the little lifeless creature rolling towards him caused him to block out the cabinets too and this was one of the things she came back to when she thought about how much she loved him.
It was odd because years prior, they’d had cockroaches for one month of their time in the apartment—they’d never had them before and they’d never had them after. But, she tackled that issue head on. She repainted the insides of each cabinet with multiple coats, she stuffed all the holes with steel wool and painted over each little bushel of wiry substance. She sprayed peppermint oil around the edges. Maybe since she’d done all that, and the mouse still got in, she figured she couldn’t win. Maybe, if she’d owned the apartment instead of rented it, she would have broken the cabinets apart with a sledge hammer and redone them all so there were no holes or crevices. Since she couldn’t do that, she said fuck it and dismissed the area all together. There were thousands of maybes.
What she wondered is, how many aspects of her life were dealt with in the same way? How much did she completely dismiss or dissolve from existence? For example, every now and then she read the newspaper and spent a small amount of time researching or reflecting on political views and happenings each month. Maybe she read headlines and talked to some of the people she knew who were news fanatics to find out what they thought. But, more often than not she kept the news similarly to how she kept those cabinets—boarded up, distant, closed off with nothing in them. She seemed to do the same type of thing when it came to money, bills, salaries, pensions—they all existed in her life and a structure was set up so she could avoid them. A structure like putting pots on top of sets of dinner plates in the dish cabinet, keeping dry food in the fridge—even cans and teas. Structures existed so she could live without those cabinets just like structures existed so she could live, at least most of the time, without having to think twice about the news or the money. Even though she didn’t have a job at the moment, and spending was a concern, she’d find a way to close the cabinet on money again—to seal it away with the mice and the roaches. To lock it up so she never had to think about the way people murder the creatures that get in their way— believing wholeheartedly that there was absolutely no repercussion.
