Charms - Mouse

Mar 21, 2025

The First Charms.

♤

This is the first story I ever completed, about 15 months ago. It's raw, only 688 words, and when it is rewritten for the anthology it will look much, much different. But it's real, it's precious, and it happened. There is no resolution, just a moment in time that shaped the foundation of who I am.

♤

The local folk festival was my favorite event of the year as a little girl. We would go all day and all night on Saturday and Sunday, enjoying all the "foreign" (largely European) food and music and dancing. It was there that I learned how to square dance, which was important to me as a child, because it gave me social credit in gym class whenever our gym teachers decided square dancing had become a sport. It was also where I learned the dark history of the tradition, which was also important to me as a child, because offending anyone was anathema to me.

I learned one of the most important lessons about people during my time there. If you give them privacy, silence, and eye contact, in an environment where they're at ease, people will talk to you about themselves. We can't seem to help it. People need to be witnessed. We need to justify our existence, to purge our sins, to feel seen. Obviously it doesn't work every single time, but my success rate speaks for itself.

That day, I had been talking to Lisa. Lisa and I had been hanging out all day Saturday when we found ourselves in one of the stairwells scattered around the high school campus that hosted the event. I was probably 11, but I always lied about my age, so she probably thought I was 13. Lisa was 17. She had long blonde hair tied back in a messy braid and green eyes that looked to big for her face. We laughed and cheered and clapped and sang all day, but every time she fell silent, she looked worried. I wasn't able to appreciate at the time just how much emotional energy she put into her camouflage, but I knew I had been talking to two different people.

I met Worried Lisa in the stairwell. She fidgeted with her hair while I talked about the moorish dancers. We fell silent, and she looked up at me.

"I feel ways around little boys."

I stared at her, unable to grasp what she meant. I waited. Waiting was the important part when you want people to speak. People shut down if you start talking while they're vulnerable. Once an exchange has occurred, the social contract has been fulfilled, they're released from revealing anything more. So you don't fulfill the contract. You wait.

"I was at the beach. I stared at him. My cousin. He's four."

Her words stumbled out and ran into each other, little verbal bumper cars slamming the word in front of it, rushing for a destination she hadn't decided on yet. I waited.

"He's only four, and I wanted him to be naked. Why would I want that?"

A lesson I had not learned yet: don't answer a question if you're not sure about the answer.

"Maybe you thought he was uncomfortable?"

She barked. Maybe it was a laugh or a scoff or a sigh all at once, but I couldn't make sense of it, so I waited.

She rubbed her face and stood up.

"Let's go watch the dancers."

We left the stairwell and Worried Lisa behind. We laughed and cheered and clapped and sang for a few more hours, and then it was time to go home. I went looking for her on Sunday when we returned, but she was gone. I never saw her again. It would be a few more years before I realized the full magnitude of what Worried Lisa was trying to tell me. I wished I could have had something more meaningful to say to her, something to keep her safe from herself. I still don't know what that might have been.

After I gave up searching for her at the festival, I went to scour the merchants tables with the last of my spending money. As I was perusing a craft table, I saw a little bowl filled with leather mice. I thought about how cats sometimes taunted their prey before killing it, and I bought the mouse for two dollars. I think I just needed something to take care of.

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