Alas, I don’t have pictures, so you’ll just have to trust me that these things really happened.

My mother says she has a menagerie under her chair, and I do believe she does. At any rate, it’s somewhere, and the critters often appear from under her chair.

What critters, you ask?

Lessee. There have been blue-tailed skinks. There was a squirrel in the attic. There were the wasps that freakin’ ate through her ceiling. There were at least two teeny tiny snakes, one dead and one alive (dead, once the cats caught it). There have been generations of toads using the underside of the water dish on her front porch as their summer home. There was the big snake that was trying to crawl through the latticework to get under her porch, that she — my mother, I’m talking about — grabbed it by the tail and gave it a heart attack so, when she let go, it took off into the woods and fugeddabout the cool under the porch.

And, the other night, she took a lantern and showed me a precious little mouse behind her television. She said it had been playing with the cats all afternoon, but now she thought it was dead. She wanted me to take care of it because, she said, I’m the “little baby mousie expert.” So I put an empty plastic tub on top of it and slid a piece of cardboard under it.

It stopped pretending it was dead and cussed me six ways to Sunday. I carried it out and released it in the side yard. It didn’t even give me a tip. Maybe some day I’ll be caught in a net and it’ll come chew through the rope and free me. Hey, it could happen.

A WRITING PROMPT FOR YOU: A character comes into closer-than-comfortable contact with an animal.

MA