Page 49 of Grace & Henry's Holiday Movie Marathon
“It’s just up here alittle more,” says Ian.
“I’ll take your word for it,” I say, following him into the woods.
Downtown Baltimore is as urban as it gets, but the edges of the city and surrounding suburbs feel like they were carved from unbroken nature in the Days of Yore. A deer startles fifty feet away. As it trots off, two others appear and follow, annoyed with our traipsing. An empty teeter-totter leans crooked up ahead, alongside a dented slide and some monkey bars. Two girls dressed in black drift lazily back and forth on swings that are too small for them. They stop swinging when they spot me, a grown man carrying a cage.
“There’s a stream up there,” says Ian. “They’ll like it, I bet.”
“What’s in there?” one of the swing girls asks.
“Nothing,” I say.
“Mice!” says Ian.
Two sets of sneakers plant into gravel. “Um, what? Did he say mice?”
They’re following us now, and I work up some talking points in my head in case a cop happens by and I’m forced to explain why I appear to be luring three children into a forest.
Ian stops. As far as bodies of water go, this trickle is something smaller than a stream. Rocky edges, slowly moving clumps of leaves. “See?” he says. “It’s perfect.”
“Good thinking, man.” It’s not perfect, but it’ll do. I set the cage down.
“Are they, like, your pets?” one of the girls asks. She has black-painted fingernails, matching black bangs slung across her eyes.
“No,” says Ian. “They lived in our house for a while, though. They like crackers. The Ritz ones, mostly.”
“Cool,” the other girl says.
I open the trap, and for maybe twenty seconds the mice do nothing. From their perspectives, I get it. I might as well have put them on a tiny shuttle and launched them toward the moon. “Go on,” I say. “You’re, um, free.” When I nudge the cage with my shoe, finally, one mouse—the braver of the two—steps onto the grass, and I take a cautious step back in case it tries to attack me.
“Are you, like, scared?” Bangs asks.
“He’s just startled,” says Ian.
The second mouse appears and stands beside its friend. They seemed normal-size back at Grace’s house but they’re impossibly small now in the open wild.
“I don’t think they know what to do?” says Ian.
“Get out of here,” I whisper. “Go.”
Then, quite suddenly and startlingly, they do, at full speed toward god knows where.
“Bye, mice,” says Ian.
And good luck,I think.
“Are they gonna be okay,do you think?”
“Oh yeah,” I say. “Lots of food—a stream. You picked a good spot.”
Ian has volunteered to carry the trap back, and he’s holding it like a football. It’s just us again because the girls got bored and went back to the swings after the mice bolted. The sun is sinking, so the streetlights have come on along with Christmas lights on a few houses.
“I really like the book you got me,” says Ian.
“I’m glad, buddy,” I say.
“My mom said you’re an artist.”
“Nah. You’re therealartist. I just design displays for potato chip companies.”
