Of Mice and Women

‘The problem was having to kill them.’

No matter how many mice came, there always seemed to be more, especially in the colder seasons. On some mornings, after an especially hard night, I’d wake up to find my apartment full of corpses stuck to glue traps.

Mice weren’t the problem. The problem was having to kill them. After a brief stop in Tbilisi that turned into nine months, J and I had finally made it to London. The ground-floor apartment in Clapham was otherwise clean, but during the night, strange noises came from the corridor.

“It’s probably just the neighbours,” I said, turning over on the other side, my eyes hidden behind a sleeping mask. “You know how the Brits are.”

“It’s rats,” she replied, with a tone of conviction — the kind you hear from lawyers defending a case in court. “Rats crawling inside the walls, plotting to eat us alive in our sleep.”

I chuckled. “Yeah, maybe that too.”

By the second year of our marriage, I was used to J’s paranoia about anything small that moved. Insects, birds, petite dogs, even odd-shaped rocks were under suspicion. Her fear was genuine, unshakeable, and largely indiscriminate. A gush of wind from behind the window, the dishwasher stopping — the tiniest things could wake her up from the deepest sleep and start shaking me by the shoulder.

I was dreaming of trains and steam engines one night when her voice came through like a conductor announcing the next stop. “Did you know that an average person eats up to seven spiders in their…