In the kitchen: scissors at a barbershop, fast and sharp and tinny, short bursts of snippy-choppy, the bumpy bisected swish of doubt and cramp. The mice are on the stovetop. They return, time to time. If only they'd eat faster, in larger amounts, there'd be no food left, and they'd leave.

Every sound in the house is an infection. My sister is the loudest one. She bellows at the drips of rain from the hallway ceiling, at the metal scrape of her key in the mangled deadbolt, at the plumbing grumbling beneath the bathroom floor, at the slow buffering stutter of internet television, and when the neighbors' boots are on the roof, and at the landlord's double-doorbell-ring, or at the clink of beer bottles stacked too high in the garbage, and at the clicking pilot light of an unreliable stove, all of which are punctuated by my silence. There are louder sounds still, I mean to squeak.

Noise itself. I bought a gun and I heard the sounds of toenail clippers, microphone static, potato chips, toothpicks, blowjobs, and I fired bang bang bang bang bang at those puny rodents on my stovetop, who merely hid in the oven.

---