A woman circles the track at the YMCA after work, around and around like a mouse on a wheel. Not a hamster, like one might expect. She’s far more mouse-like—anxious, prone to tachycardia, most active at night. Plus, she had pet mice as a child, several pairs of them: Sunny and Cher were tan and brown, Breezy and Cloudy were white with red eyes and grew tumors that slowly seeped through the skin like blood on a coffee filter. When each set died, her father built tiny black coffins with red velvet hot-glued inside, their little bodies buried in the empty lot across the street years before another 90s cookie-cutter house would emerge in the night. She wonders if a worker digging for plumbing ever found the exhumed remnants, performed the sign of the cross, said a silent prayer.
She wouldn’t mind running outside, but sometimes it’s rainy, or snowy, or after sunset and she doesn’t want to get grabbed (or wonder if there’s anyone in her neighborhood who would even want to grab her). Running on a treadmill makes her want to die a little bit. It’s unnatural to exert that much effort to propel a body forward without actually going anywhere, like trying to run in a nightmare. Plus, you’re not supposed to hog the treadmills at the Y for more than thirty minutes, and she likes to go for longer than that. Sometimes she circles the track at five in the morning after she can’t sleep all night. When four rolls around and she’s still sprawled on the couch watching the Home Shopping Network, she goes to the Y so she doesn’t sink between the cushions and disappear forever. In the pre-dawn hours, the gym is dreamlike, nearly empty. The locker room is haunted; the shower runs but no one ever goes in or out. Fluorescent lights flicker messages in Morse code. The track is framed by vast widows, flecks of snow gliding along black sky, and when she passes her own reflection, she’s not entirely convinced it’s not watching her from the corner of its eye.
She wonders what the mice think about when they run. Is it instinct? Boredom? Do they know they’re not going anywhere, not really? She circles the track and thinks of her mother, who orders the same thing from the same restaurant every Sunday morning—no changes or substitutions. She circles the track and notes what she’ll pack for lunch the next day to eat alone at her desk in an empty office, everyone else out for the holidays. She counts the laps like she counts the alarms she’ll set in five-minute increments to force herself to wake before the sun, to wash her face and fix her hair and scrape ice from her car. She wonders how many laps she’ll get the next night, and the one after that.
