(no subject)

She held a glass jar with something dark inside in front of her where we couldn't quite make it out. She rubbed at it and layer after layer came loose, all thin, a bit like cellophane, until it loomed inside a nest of its own leavings. The dark became tapped at some point and clouded outward, tinting the layers. I was sure it would become a bird but birds, it turns out, are all from eggs. This became only a mess. She must have known as she slid it into a trashcan across the way. But the joke was on you and me. By midday all of the trash had been arranged into a series of scaffolding gestures across the can. They were a single pathway that mice ran along, at intervals, and only the fact that the same mice never came back stopped you from guessing that it joined back up with itself somewhere behind. Except then you wondered if the mice were the same but just changing. Maybe circuits amounted to seasons, and the tiny beach balls, little scarves, miniature rakes or thumbnail-sized schoolbook satchels just punctuated a process of change in the mice that was one with their onward motion. So you'd stop one with your thumb just to see. It would wiggle and glare at you and then settle down to wait till you were satisfied its hairs were growing white no faster than your own. You'd then follow it with your eyes till it disappeared. You'd have given it a name by now, imprinted it in your mental rolodex in as much detail as rodents can be granted there, but still, when gone it was gone. The mice that went behind went nowhere at all, it appeared. It was the opposite of a perpetual motion machine. She'd found a way to make something stop. Not persist at rest but go away altogether. What nothing else in the universe can do. I put my head in the trashcan to see how, but it was just a mouse dressing room. They squimmicked at me angrily and threatened to lash me with my own nose hairs. I begged of them to know where the dark fluid was, or the film. One agreed to show me. It climbed up onto the path and scurried about under awnings, among stiles, across rails, through tubes, down ramps, about spirals, in and out of cells, up a paper, into a hanging mass and behind a shoulder. And then it was gone.