Off

Jordan Hill

In a windowless room in downtown Seattle, Jeffrey Rotterdam is learning how to kill mice. It’s a miserable place, even by lab standards. Bright fluorescent lights blaze from industrial beams. The scent of nostril-cutting ammonia, which Jeffrey figures to come from a cleaning agent, smells more like the piss of his alcoholic father. His dad, a retired Air Force sergeant from Kentucky, had arranged the summer assistantship. Jeffrey knew better than to protest. 

Only two objects stand on the counter: a transport cage full of mice and a metal instrument called a rodent guillotine. The latter is a foot and a half high and rooted in a metal base, ensuring stability for its upright blades. A long, yellow handle connects to a spring and slants away from the contraption. Jeffrey inspects the guillotine’s sharp, rhombic blades, resisting the urge to poke a finger in its two-inch opening. He’s shocked to discover labs across America use such violent methods. 

The only other person in the room is Clara, a slender postdoc who trains the undergraduate research assistants. She’s shocked that he’s shocked. “Did you think the mice just retired once the experiments were done? Just took their little mouse paychecks and moved to Florida for some R and R?” 

Jeffrey musters a laugh, though he knows Clara must be thinking, I can’t believe they hired this dumb fatty. Whenever Jeffrey imagines people chastising him, they always take the raspy voice of his father: Cadet, you better pay attention to the nice mouse murderer lady, or I’m gonna confiscate your Cold Stone Rewards Card! 

The twenty mice they are to “dispose of” are neonates. Infants. Bald, pink, and blind; huddling together for warmth in a glass cage labeled LIVE ANIMALS. Clara said they came from a study examining the effect of a certain drug on fetuses. As soon as the mice were born, they became useless to the institute. And when mice were deemed useless, they were taken here.

Jeffrey imagines his recently deceased mother using the guillotine to chop parsley. He misses her warm hugs and cold salads. Eating fast food was how Jeffrey coped, and it showed: he had just received his 2XL lab coat. 

“Mouse me,” says Clara.

Jeffrey reaches into the cage. The mice must not have been in there for long—none had pissed in it yet. But then again, what even was the size of a baby mouse’s bladder? At random, Jeffrey plucks one from its family, ignoring its soft, protesting squeak. It is as small as a bonbon and feels as delicate as whipped cream. He can’t discern its gender, and though it is very ugly–its pink appearance and skin folds resemble a scrotum–it’s also alarmingly adorable. He passes it to Clara, ignoring the sweat marinating inside his blue gloves. 

Keeping a grip on the back of the mouse’s body, Clara places its neck dead-center between the blades. “They always wriggle,” she says, “which is a problem since the blades need to line up perfectly with their necks for ideal slicing.” 

Jeffrey surveys the guillotine’s thick edges, unconvinced they’d have trouble cutting through a geode. 

Clara continues: “Decapitation at the neck only requires one handle-pull. Easy for the mouse, easy for you. It gives the mouse a humane, trauma-less death. Most importantly, it lowers guillotine wear and tear.”

The baby mouse sniffs Clara’s gloved thumb. Jeffrey rubs his Adam’s apple, which seems to irritate her. She clears her throat. “My old supervisor taught me how to get mice to freeze up. The trick is to blow on them.”

Jeffrey hears his father cackle. Ask if she can blow on you! 

As Jeffrey tells his father to shut up, Clara bends down to face the jittery mouse. Her oily nose almost touches its pointed, pinhead-sized snout. She licks her grenadine lips. 

The mouse shrinks back and issues a high-pitch squeak. 

Clara takes a deep breath then exhales with force, as if the tiny mouse head were a birthday candle. 

The mouse, like Jeffrey, is stunned. Its body stiffens in her blue hand.

Clara straightens and pulls the guillotine handle. The two blades swoop down—snip!—and the mouse’s head bounces onto the counter.

Holy shit, Cadet, that mama ain’t messing around!

“And voilà!” says Clara. “Questions? Or are you ready to take over?”

Jeffrey’s lungs cramp and his heart patters. You coward. No son of mine… The dialogue in Jeffrey’s head has been particularly harsh these past few months. Ever since Mom’s funeral, Dad had remarked on Jeffrey’s expanding waist with more and more venom: Lard-ass, Four-sons-in-one, Sphere-with-limbs, embarrassment-to-the-family. The more Jeffrey ate, the more he resembled his mother—weak jawline, pink cheeks, large butt. His father loved that woman more than anything, and he hated Jeffrey for reminding him of her. 

In the lab, Jeffrey can almost hear his dad rasp, Real men don’t have asthma attacks when they see rodent blood! After a few assisted breaths, Jeffrey pockets his inhaler, wets his lips, and glances at Clara. “I won’t be doing this,” he gestures at the guillotine, “the whole summer, right?” 

“Correct,” says Clara. “I’m only showing you this for fun. Next week you’ll get to be CEO. And then—”

“Got it. Just head chopping.”
She faces him. “Look, I get it. It’s sad we have to do this,” she says, her bored voice several area codes away from sadness. She flicks the headless body into a biohazard bin. “But for humanity’s future, there must be sacrifices.”

Jeffrey makes the mistake of looking at the mouse’s head on the counter below. Cadet, says the mouse head in his dad’s voice, you’ll never be able to chop me like Clara! That’s why she’s an alpha and you’re a fluffy f—

Jeffrey brushes the head into the bin. 

“Do you want to see me do it again,” says Clara, “or you think you got the gist?”

“I’d like to see it again. If that’s all right?” 

Clara rolls her eyes and nods. 

Jeffrey reaches into the cage for a second time. He notices an especially plump mouse trying to squeeze itself into the group’s cozy center. He gives it to Clara, shrugging off a cold sensation he last felt after dropping a vase of lilies.  

Get it together, Cadet! Jeffrey tries to set himself straight. He wishes there was a mirror in the room, so that he might give himself a pep talk; the kind football coaches gave their players at halftime in his father’s favorite films. 

But there is no mirror, and Jeffrey is uneasy. He tries to find solace in rational thought. There will only be moral consequences for killing baby mice if 1) there is an afterlife, and 2) God is a rodent. Neither of these possibilities seem likely… Idiot, did you really just picture God as a mouse? 

Clara holds the rodent between the guillotine blades and grips the handle. She takes a slow breath. Her mouth expands, forcing air into her swelling lungs and tightening two buttons on her lab coat. 

Before she can shoot out carbon dioxide, her phone rings. Clara sighs, hands Jeffrey the mouse, and takes off a glove to inspect the caller ID. 

Jostled during the handoff, the baby mouse squeaks and tries to pull its ears back. One ear twitches, then flops against its tiny head. It presses its body against the warmth of Jeffrey’s cupped hands. All right, it’s cute, I’ll give you that. But orders are orders.  

Clara answers. “Hey, babe. Oh, that’s all right, I can talk.” With her free hand, she points at Jeffrey, then at the mouse. When Jeffrey doesn’t move, she mimes pulling the guillotine handle. “You did what?” She groans into her phone. “The reservations needed to be put in at least three days in advance.”

Jeffrey mouths, “Now?” 

Clara’s eyes narrow. “Hang on,” she says. “I think my new intern just decided to join Greenpeace. Yes, kill it! Does Anthony’s still have those vegan sliders we like?”

Do your job, Cadet! 

Under the lab’s cold lights, Jeffrey squeezes the mouse too hard, and it squeaks. Its head shakes and its body quivers. Jeffrey has seen this before. He rolls this image around in his brain like a tongue probing a cut lip. 

Then it comes to him, the morning of his mother’s seizure. The way her pleading eyes locked with his. The way she fell, head hitting the counter, lungs fluttering. The way the overflowing sink water soaked into her floral apron. The way her legs rattled against the cabinets. 

Stop thinking of her, Fat Boy! 

Before the ambulance arrived, Jeffrey had dabbed her foaming mouth and cradled her twitching head. “Hold on,” he had begged her. “I’m here with you. Please, hold on.”

COMPLETE THE TASK AT HAND.

Jeffrey positions the mouse inside the jaws of the guillotine. 

“Any day now, and don’t forget to blow,” Clara says.

Jeffrey bends toward its small face, takes a breath, and freezes the mouse. His fingers choke the guillotine handle. He musters all the numbing resolve that he has. In his mind, he opens a door, one he has frequently entered these past few months. Here, he is in ninth grade PE and no one in the locker room changes next to him after finding out what he is; here he plays football and tackles Sam Warren and hears that thrilling crunch of bone; here he feels whiskeyed breath and hard, pummeling fists; here he cries for mercy as Dad’s leather belt flays his curled back.  

The mouse in his hands strains against his commanding grip. 

BE A MAN.

A tiny, pink paw reaches toward Jeffrey’s nose. Jeffrey remembers his mother’s favorite painting, where God reaches toward Adam. He cannot imagine his mother in a wretched place like this.  

STOP. THAT’S AN ORDER. 

But Jeffrey’s recollections accelerate, speeding through dusty scenes. His mother playing charades even though she was the worst in the family; his mother buying his first microscope as a birthday gift; popping a firework at his high school graduation, though they were explicitly banned by staff; crying over a deployed husband; smiling when Jeffrey cheered her up by performing the Mamma Mia! soundtrack, though both knew he couldn’t carry a tune.

Try as he might, Jeffrey cannot lock the door to these spilling memories of love.

He releases the handle and places the mouse back in the cage. “I quit.” 

“You what?”

Jeffrey peels off his enormous lab coat. 

To her phone: “I’ll call you back.” To Jeffrey: “You don’t want to do this. An internship here is like a gold star to medical schools. You’re tossing that away, for what? Do you even know what study these mice came from? The embryos were intravenously injected with tumor cells. We’re doing them a favor.”

Jeffrey leaves his folded lab coat on the counter. “Good luck, Clara.”

Feeling lighter than he’s felt in months, Jeffrey opens up the door and heads for the interns’ lockers. Sunlight sails in through the hallway windows and casts his shadow onto the wall. Outside, two yellow butterflies glide past, looping and diving in a way fighter pilots could only dream of. Jeffrey marvels at their beauty and freedom. Yes, he would soon have to face his dad, and yes, things were likely to get worse before they got better. At the end of the hallway, Jeffrey hesitates, waiting for his father’s voice. 

It never comes.