death parade with ribbon dancers

We did not witness its birth, but this made it easier to imagine the heartbreak the mother felt when her first born (we assumed) didn't move or cry or suckle. We didn't know if the mother had stopped in the gutter, exhausted with labor pains, and cried alone and cold during delivery. Or had she been disgusted by the stillness of the fetus and dragged it to this most undignified place, to lay next to the silt and crumbles of asphalt that stuck in our bike tires? In our mind, the mother had every trait of her own species, along with those of the woman down the street in the trailer with the pink curlers and Virginia Slims and clogs with fur trim and fingernails so long they curled back into her hands. This mother we created crossed the species line in a way we didn't understand.

We knew that she did not literally have the red, curling nails and that her fur would never be filled with pink curlers and that her hairless tail would never curl around a cigarette with ash growing like a second tail.

We also knew that the trailer-dwelling mother didn't have four skinny teeth or whiskers or an especially strong love of cheese. This, however, did not stop our own mothers from calling her mousey. Not a pet name. A complaint. She was dry, brittle, frantic.

Nor did it stop our mothers from accusing her of living with a rat. You can understand our confusion, then, over which traits we shared and which parts of us were connected to this mouse-woman. You can understand the compassion, then, that we felt on seeing the body of the infant mouse curled in the runoff water heading for the storm drain.

We gathered the body in a small box with a firm, forest-green lid that said Roger's in gold letters. The body seemed so big in the box. We had debated the matchbox, the effect it would create. It may even have been more glorious, to strike the side and set the box aflame.

The Roger's box came to rest inside the wooden well that my neighbor had in the back yard, a lawn decoration. There was no bucket and no water and nothing truly well-ish about the shingled roof and tiled sides, other than the familiar shape that we found in our various nursery rhymes. We climbed over the side of the well and dug a hole with our hands, not caring that the earth clung to our fingernails, not caring that we cut a worm in half on the way. The worm did not receive the same funeral procession as the almost-mouse.

It is the procession was the part we knew was most important, but is, for some reason or another, the part that I remember least. We stood in line and were careful not to smile. We did not have flashing lights or cars to put them on as we went along the road, but I have the slightest recollection of ribbon dancers in our hands, feeling that their colors were the most appropriate kind of mourning.