A month into the new year already? Edgar Snatch woke up surrounded by trees.
To his left, his sledgehammer pressed into the wet forest ground. To his right, nothing but trees. He sat up and looked up into the sky, staring at the daylight filtering through the thick upper canopy of the trees.
“Mother?” he called. He never ventured into the woods without Mother. She did not answer his call.
He turned his gray eyes to the sledgehammer at his left and wrapped his hands around the wooden handle. Splinters peeled off and stuck into the skin of his hands as he wrung the handle in his fingers like a chicken’s neck.
“Mother?” he called again.
His heart thundered. A fear creeped through him as he realized he might be alone in the forest.
“Mother?” his tone stretched out, louder. No answer came back to him. The trees could not talk.
The sledgehammer comforted him as tiny pinpricks of blood from the tiny splinters spotted the rough wood of the hammer’s handle. The weight of the hammer was his anchor. He used the hammer as a crutch, pushing up to his feet to stand.
He noticed the blood splattered on the head of the sledgehammer and turned in a full circle to search for his victim.
“Danielle?” he called into the forest.
He waited for the answer, but none came.
Snatch shouldered the sledgehammer and searched for footprints leading in. In theory, he guessed, he would be able to follow the tracks out of the forest and back to the farmhouse. He found no tracks. Even as he stepped around on the muddy, soft forest ground, he left no marks.
“Barefoot?” he asked aloud. He looked down at his bare feet and wiggled his toes in the dirt. A shiver passed from the bottom of his feet to the top of his head.
He searched the woods around him for a sign of how he got there; he looked for another person. A shape, a fleeting silhouette, perhaps, but he saw nothing.
***
Snatch lifted the board and looked beneath it.
The mouse was gone.
***
Snatch gripped the sledgehammer tight in his hand and stared at the ground as he recalled the mouse. The dead mouse had returned from the grave and invaded his bedroom to speak with him.
The sound of something in the undergrowth of the forest brought Snatch out of his thoughts and he searched the fallen leaves and branches for the source of the sounds. He pulled the sledgehammer up and wrapped both hands around it.
He held the hammer back; he cocked it, coiled it tightly like the spring in a gun preparing to drop the pin on a bullet.
***
Snatch brought the sledgehammer down with a heavy smack, and a satisfying splat, on the dead mouse. He lifted the sledgehammer and looked beneath it.
There was no mouse.
***
“There was no mouse,” Snatch said, surrounded by the forest.
He slammed the sledgehammer down into the dirt. The sledgehammer created a crater in the forest floor.
Snatch lifted the sledgehammer out of the small crater created by the hammer’s impact and leaned down to inspect the dirt. Something stuck up from the dirt, barely visible in the bottom of the crater. He reached down and plucked at the white, broken bone sticking up from the dirt.
Mouse bone.
Dead mouse bone.
“There was a mouse,” Snatch said.
***
Snatch lifted the floorboard to look beneath it. He checked twice and rubbed his eyes with one hand. He trembled and gulped.
The mouse was gone.
***
Snatch made his way out of woods, following the dying sun to find the farmhouse. His mind convulsed inside his skull; it bounced around like a rubber ball in a concrete room. He wondered what his brain was trying to say.
As he emerged from the woods, he moved out of his intended path and approached the place where the dead mouse’s grave was positioned at the edge of the woods. He saw the telltale signs of recent digging. If the mouse was still dead beneath the dirt, then the mouse was never in his bedroom after the burial.
Edgar dropped to one knee and let the sledgehammer fall from his shoulder. He dug into the ground with his trembling hands.
Scared.
Afraid of what he might not find.
But his fears were squashed quickly enough. He lifted two scoops of dirt from the ground with his hands and found the mouse. Dead. As it should be.
Snatch breathed a heavy, labored sigh of relief. With the mouse still here, it could never have been in his bedroom after he buried it.
He slowly pushed dirt back into the mouse’s grave.
The mouse turned its head and focused on Snatch with its dead black eyes. The dead rodent twitched its rotting lips.
The mouse said, “Hello there, Edgar Snatch.
