This week, the Miscellany starts out with another Creative Spotlight, introducing a piece of flash fiction written by senior English major Julie Zhou. Check it out below!
The Minotaur
It starts because she remembers it as a dead mouse.
Or, I suppose, it starts twenty minutes earlier— when she first leaves her house, hair pulled into a tight ponytail, ends feathering against her shoulders. It is the first Thursday in March that it’s been nice enough to run, and the world is still a little grey; but the clouds are gilded at the edges, and patches of grass are peeking through the snow, and it is, for all rights and purposes, a beautiful day to be outside.
She is rounding the corner of Cascade and Fifth when she runs past it: a tiny field mouse, crumpled in a heap near the edge of the sidewalk, tail draped over the curb. She keeps running, but it stays with her, this tiny dead field mouse, as she makes her way beyond the rows of suburban homes to the long stretch of highway that borders her neighborhood.
#
Miscarriage is an ugly word, claustrophobic and heavy, the monster under her bed when she goes to sleep at night.
“The minotaur,” her doctor had called it instead. “It’ll keep asking for more until you have nothing to give.”
She thinks of that sometimes, when she’s running— pictures the road like a Daedalus string, unspooling into the world as she winds her way between whitewashed fences and flowerpots on front stops and suburban homes and they keep closing in, a maze and a monster that she can only outrun if she follows the road all the way to the end.
#
This is where we diverge.
See, the field mouse is not a field mouse, but in fact a leaf: brown and yellow and curled in on itself, stem extending over the side of the cement. It is like any other leaf strewn across the sidewalk that day, tangled in the early spring breeze, skittering across the ground in stutters and stops, the detritus of a long winter.
Just a leaf.
If she had seen the leaf, she might have thought of the drought in October, when people measured everything in the seconds it would take to burn. She might have remembered long evenings when she was younger, watching the sunset from her roof, learning how to whistle from the whippoorwills that had roosted in the eaves of the house: a hollow warble against the back of her throat, sad and sweet and cool, that left an odd pressure against her temples. She might have remembered dust hanging low in the air and cracks widening in the sidewalk, treetops fading into the evening sky in red-gold smudges. She might have stepped on the leaf and heard the crackle, felt it turn to dust under her feet. And then, perhaps, by the time she reached the highway, she might have forgotten the leaf altogether, and turned around to go back home.
But that is not what happens. Instead, she remembers the mouse, remembers tiny ears and shuttered eyes and a curling tail that looks just like the silvery scar that threads across her abdomen: the one that ripples against her skin when it’s sunny, like the broken chain of a belt. Instead, she remembers the mouse and tiny claws and velvet fur pulled over fracturing ribs, and she remembers white white ceilings and one late night in early January and spines protracting and blood on the sheets and then unformed bones and a calcified silence, sharp and unyielding.
She doesn’t see the leaf. Instead, she sees the dead mouse and remembers tiny, hollow bones, and when she hits the highway— hair whipping against her face, knees aching, air scraping its way down her throat— she just keeps running.