Space Invaders

Living in the hundred year old farm house was a dream of ours when given us for $10 and other valuable considerations. No matter that the well was almost dry and the electricity original. We sold our previous house still with a full mortgage of $46,000, so we’d made no profit, but we were still ahead half our debt after borrowing only $20,000 in order to put in a furnace, get the water running. Basically the money covered nothing cosmetic, but was just enough to allow for modern conveniences, except for a new rug in the living room.

Plopped in the middle of twenty or so acres of alfalfa fields, there were plenty of meadow voles, kangaroo rats and common mice and our cat liked eating the heads off of these—leaving them as gifts on the new carpet.

One day as I was vacuuming the large rug, the machine started making a terrible noise, I supposed the belt had come off, but when I’d turned it sideways in order to take a look, I saw a mysterious space worm wriggling out at me and for a fraction of a second couldn’t wrap my mind around what had congested my cleaning. Upon further inspection, I saw that it was a mouse, smashed between the metal plate and the roller! Somehow I’d actually sucked up one of the field mice that had been running freely around our house. I threw the entire machine out the front door and waited for my husband to come home and remove her.

My husband and I were both very young—too young really to be married, but we lasted ten years. One of my favorite memories is of him sitting in his fruit of the loom underpants, red, striped football socks pulled up his long, skinny legs, no shirt, him watching TV with a blow-dart gun in hand. I’d been sickened watching him shoot the orange-capped arrows through their twitching bodies, but feeling pleased he was clearing our space from the invaders.

Photo credit: Ryan Stone/unsplash