Through Their Eyes
Through Their Eyes (originally "Just Desserts for Rats")
Still touching the hilt of the sword, she declares,
“No fencing for HIM at the end of the month. His pastime is so bloody boring!”
The mouse in her house regards her with cockiness from underneath a chair.
“Yeah, BEN, my FRIEND, I’m talking to YOU.” She returns the mouse's stare.
“And you sure do make a racket at night down here on this kitchen flooring!”
The ashes she flicks from her cigarette fall soundlessly to the tiles.
She casually leafs through a travel brochure, then looks over at “Ben.”
“Yeah, that husband of mine sure thought he could fool me,
but he’ll never try that again.”
She fixes her gaze on Ben’s beady eyes; then back on the pages and smiles.
The names of rendezvous spots of her husband she’d got
from a slime ball she’d hired to sleuth.
“He did a good job, that big tub of lard. Yes, I do have to give him that,
but he sure knew how to give me the creeps with his body all sweaty and fat.”
She puts some milk on sweet rice in a bowl. “I only wanted the truth.
Cat got your tongue? Too bad there’s no cat. I’d love to see you swallowed.”
The mouse doesn’t flinch.
Now she looks down at a pile of the sleuth’s photographs.
“This first batch of photos wasn’t so hot.” She turns to the rodent and laughs.
“But this second group. . . .Every cent was well-spent
to have that bastard followed!”
She puts the rice pudding with milk on the floor near a form centered there
and stoops as she pours from a bottle marked “poison”
its contents into the bowl. Leaning down by the shape on the floor,
she says, “Soon you‘ll have Ben‘s company.”
And then to the mouse: “ Come here, little rat, come eat till you’re full.”
Then grabbing her bags pre-packed for Australia,
she kicks at the corpse on the floor so carefully centered -
kicks right at the spot where, by her hand, the sword so easily entered.
Written 8/18/2012
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