Blind Mice Melody Sage Otto believes the children are mice. He hears them sifting through sugar in the cellar and sets traps. Traps he cannot bring himself to check. Solveig had done that task, to spare him. Then he hears the children whisper, thistle-light and incoherent, disquieting. It has been a long time since he has encountered other voices—years even. “Who is there?” Footsteps in the dark answer him. Displaced household objects orbit Otto. His tobacco pipe set six millimeters to the right. Brittle petals scattered in his underwear drawer. The lid left open on the idle dust-furred piano. Fresh bed sheets rumpled and undone. Coming in from pickaxing root vegetables from the ice, he trips over a shoe on the threshold. Flakes of mud crust off the sole. He holds it up. It does not span the length of his hand. He sets another trap, taking a special package from a locked trunk, setting it in his lap, and pretending to sleep. They come breathless on tiptoe. Otto remembers the pure want he once felt, peering in through the gilded glass of the candy store. From the faraway vantage of age, his young self seems more like the child he never made. He forces his eyelids smooth. His moustache tingles and begins to itch. When they reach into the jar of licorice, he seizes hold of their wrists. “Please, I only want to speak with you.” Snorting, they fight to break free. A thick crystal ashtray cracks on his skull. Sometime later, he rolls over and pats the ground. His thinning hair is wet, and there is a wet circle on the crocheted rug. The shards of glass and blood cling to his palms. Still trembling, he
does his best to clean up. Otto talks out loud, as he rinses off in the porcelain sink. “Before the war, everyone was someone else. I was a professor of literature. My lectures were linked to ten thousand students around the world, in places that may no longer exist— Papa New Guinea, Iceland, France. I lived in a snow globe of words, fragile and blinding. I never saw the end coming, the fall from the high shelf.” From behind his back, the boy interrupts him, curt and abrupt. “What happened to your eyes, then?” “I apologize. I imagine the scars must look very frightening. I had the misfortune to glance up from the book I was reading into the profane light of a nuclear blast. The glare was so severe, so bright, steam collected in my eyeballs, and they burst from the pressure. My wife found me and dragged me down eleven flights of stairs. She exchanged her jewelry for rides out of the city, leaving a sparkling trail of diamonds and rubies behind like bread crumbs. Solveig was a determined woman. She had inherited this farm. In the summer, we used to come here on holiday.” “Where is she now?” Otto pinches the bridge of his nose. “She is buried in the orchard.” They had been careful those first months. Solveig, always the worldly one, had prepared for the war. They took potassium iodide and wore masks outside. They boarded shut the windows and duct taped plastic to the seams. They cut and hauled brush to obscure the driveway. Their location was sheltered, remote, 108