The Hiccups

One Last Look Around the House Before We Go

The Bedroom

In this part of the house you are not supposed to sleep beneath a mirror. Or a bookshelf. Or a painting. But as she steps into the bedroom, Nora guesses her daughter gambled with her life long before the aneurysm bloomed, then burst, in her brain—a framed poster of a baby's head, crowning from the mouth of a flowerpot, is positioned six inches above the headboard. It could have shaken loose during the night and crushed Claire's skull.

Nora takes a long, shrewd look at the poster and feels something twist in her abdomen. She doesn't care for babies, she thinks. She hasn't cared for them since having Claire thirty years ago. But still there is this sharp pain, like a surge, as if somebody has stuck her with a voodoo pin.

She assesses: the rug and the floor near the doorway is worn, the paint on the wall is unevenly coated, the window shade is tattered, and the bed frame is cheap. The bed has been stripped of its sheets—likely by Henry who was here earlier to dispose of anything unpleasant—and the mattress looks deformed with the left side sagging towards the floor. Nora wonders which side Claire slept on.

Nora had Henry stop at the grocery store to pick up cleaning supplies on their way over here. She finds the plastic bags hastily dropped in the middle of the room, filled with sponges, J-Cloths, antibacterial wipes, bleach, lime-scented window cleaner, and garbage bags. Nora feels intimidated by the task at hand. There is no apparent place to start, she feels. Claire left nothing substantial behind. No clothes worth donating, no novels, or magazines, or textbooks to offer second-hand. Under the bed: months of dust. It is bad luck to sweep there when trying to call a child home. It is bad luck to throw anything out.

No personal traces of Claire exist in the house. She seems to have lived like a thief, erasing fingerprints from everything she touched.

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The Kitchen

She gasps when she sees the grout between the tiles is dark with mold—a sign of bacteria in a decaying mouth. Nora takes a Scotch-Brite pad and scrubs the floor in a furious rotation. She notices three small spindle-shaped scraps, like blackened grains of rice, at the foot of the refrigerator. Nora stops, pinches one of the pieces between her rubber-glove fingers to feel its texture.

Mice. Nora drops the pad into the garbage under the sink. She sprays the floor with bleach and wipes it down again with a J-Cloth. She throws a quick glance about the kitchen and remembers she heard somewhere that mouse droppings were poisonous. And plentiful. That in one day, a mouse can deposit up to fifty droppings that dry and release a toxic virus into the air. Nora gags and staggers away from the floor to sit at the kitchen table.

This is when she hears the noise.

A shuffling. A scratching. She cocks her head and listens. It is very faint, but she is sure she can hear something. A sound of crumpled newspaper swelling in a wastebasket. A persistent gnawing, coming from the wall, the cupboards, the floor.

There is definitely something here, she thinks. Something alive.

When she first catches sight of it she thinks it is an irregular pattern of the linoleum, or a crack in the floor. She bends at the waist, careful not to make a sound, to look closer at the crooked fibre that pokes out from under the rounded hem of the stove. She spreads her rubber glove fingers wide and reaches out. Breathing heavily, she leans further forward and presses down. A rise of muscle, a tremor of nerves, and then: the fibre wriggles beneath the weight of her palm. Nora emits a small, strange scream and thinks for a second that she is hallucinating. That mice tails are supposed to be thick, pink and fleshy like cooked ham. But this fibre is brown, almost black, and resembles more a length of knitting yarn.