Reprint Wednesday: Pamela Painter’s “Snap Judgment”

[Editor's Note: Each Wednesday, FF.Net will feature a reprint of our favorite flashes that originally appeared in print]

Two mice had drowned in the toilet. "Two mice drowned in the toilet," he told her, then immediately he wondered what made him mention or even think of that? They were flat on their backs in his bed after making love. Languorously drying separately. It was the middle of the day. Ordinarily after sex he would be thinking of French toast, bacon, or smoked salmon and her soft-scrambled eggs with chives. The Times. "So I bought traps. Two traps. Three days later, I caught two more." The traps were those that snap. "Snap." He explained the virtue of snap versus poison or glue boards. Glue boards were cruel, poison also.

She pulled the covers up to her shoulders. "What do you have against mice?" she asked.

"Mouse turds in my skillets, and they gnaw the electric wiring and burn the house down. They carry disease. I'm up to number nine," he said.

"You?" she said, "you!" He felt her turn on her side to study him, the mouse murderer. "You know," she said. "There are statistics—ratios of mice caught to those still, so to speak, roaming free. In your house."

He knew almost everything but he didn't know this.

"For every mouse you kill—snap—you can be sure there are seven more flitting about your kitchen, nesting in the walls, doing what we're doing. Did." She lifted the covers to peek at their mutually satisfied selves. Then she continued, "A buck mouse can impregnate four doe mice in one day, then each doe has four kits—you're doing the math right—and that happens every third week."

"Sixty-three mice. You're telling me that at minimum I still have sixty-three mice in my house?"

"Not all the same age, of course," she said.

He imagined nightly forays for food, scrabbling in his beloved iron skillets, nibbles out of his soap. Was she pulling his leg? Telling one of her tales? She barely knew anything. "Doe mice?" he asked. "How do you—"

"Whatever. Yeah, sure. Right now they're probably listening to us. They heard everything we did. They probably watched. We probably turned them on," she said.

"So of course quite a few are pregnant," he said. Then he turned to her to see if he'd passed muster.

"Right," she said, smiling, as if he were catching on. "Oh, fun. Done."

He pulled her in close to him, fitted her hips to his. Cozy, warm.

From the kitchen, together, they heard "Snap."