Rooms for Rent: Men Only
By Bob Thurber

My first night in that cramped, attic room I didn't sleep. Not a wink. I simply lay on my back, still as a corpse, sunk deep into the bowed, rank smelling mattress. I studied the water stains on the slanted ceiling and thought about a great number of things, including my wife, while listening to the sounds of mice scurrying through the walls. Of course, I didn't know they were mice. Like a fool I mistook the scratchy noise for the tapping of summer rain upon the roof.

The room I'd rented was a windowless space adjacent to a filthy kitchen shared by eight other roomers, all men, all of us running away from something. Each night mice traveled past my room and squeezed though holes and cracks to raid our kitchen. Previous roomers had plugged many of these entrances with cardboard and scraps of wood, but they hadn't gotten all of them, and each night the mice came and went pretty much as they pleased.

Every morning we would assess the damage — the half-gnawed boxes of corn flakes, oatmeal, pasta. We'd follow the path of mouse droppings back to some new entry point. Then seal that hole as best we could.

There was more to it, of course. The agonizing day-to-day, the petty arguments and drunken fights. Sometimes a death due to a heart attack, or an overdose. But essentially that is how we lived, tracing trails of mouse shit, discovering holes then blocking them, setting traps, spreading poison, working collectively, until someone moved out or got themselves evicted, or returned to his wife, leaving the rest of us to carry on, battling things we could not see.