Kenneth do you have a minute?

And I say yes! I am in my twenties!

I have plenty of time!

– from Kenneth Koch’s “To My Twenties”

This girl I knew, Brooke, once caught a mouse in a glue trap, put it in a plastic bag, and tossed it out her fourth-floor window. “It was snowing outside,” she said. “I didn’t want to deal with going to the dumpster.”

The bag caught on a tree branch, right next to her desk. “It hung there for months,” Brooke said, her eyes wide as she told the story. “I guess the mouse starved to death.”

I was in New York then, working as an editorial assistant for an art book publisher. It was my first job out of college. I delayed the start date for a month so my mother could finish dying from cancer.

Hieronymus Bosch? The Garden of Earthly Delights? What’s a triptych? It all sounded made up. See the nun-pig? The ears wielding a knife? I sat in the conference room and stared. Chaos, good. Everything gone to hell, correct. A bird gobbled down a torso and I loved it.

Every day, I went to a cafeteria nearby and bought cheap things for lunch. Greasy bubbling chicken. Horrific cottage cheese, like clouds passing clots. Pineapple chunks stirred in, cold and stringy.

One night, I woke up hardly able to move. What was wrong with me? I crawled on my hands and knees to the bathroom. I was violently ill, just once. Then I walked back to bed, no problem.

*

Have you ever heard a mouse scream? It sounds like a very small woman being tortured. As I lay in bed, hiding beneath my covers, the mouse in the glue trap kept squealing. Was I supposed to put it out of its misery?

When I got up to look, it was pulsing hard with every blood-beat, panting. Its body was too sensitive and obvious, like a genital.

After I found a foot in a glue trap, bitten off so the mouse could escape, I changed strategies. On the internet, I found a kind of mouse whistle, a thing you plug into the wall. It played high-pitched sounds only mice could hear. They were supposed to hate the sounds so much that they’d leave.

So I tried it. I plugged in the mouse thing. Almost immediately, I realized that I could also hear these so-called high-frequency sounds.

The mice came out from their hiding places, slowly, dreamily. The ultrasonic mouse repellent was doing something to their brains. They were more brazen now, but also off-kilter. A pair on my windowsill danced drunkenly, swaying in the moonlight for hours.

My boss told me that if I saw one mouse, there were at least seven nearby. The most I ever saw at one time was four. Were there 28 mice in my walls? But I had heard the mouse whistle, too. I too sometimes felt like a single heartbeat, bursting from my fur. Maybe there were seven of me also, sniffing inside the walls.

Brooke had acted like she was a bystander. But was I that different? After I threw the mouse repellent away, I used mousetraps, which came in discreet black boxes. I heard the small axes fall in the middle of the night, then fell asleep to the soothing sounds of the beheadings. In the morning, I collected the little black coffins and tossed them in the garbage.

*

Once upon a time, a town hired a pied piper to get rid of its rats. He used his magical pipe to lure the rats into a lake, where he drowned them. When the town wouldn’t pay the piper for this whimsical but troubling service, he lured their children away to their deaths instead.

When I was very young, I thought the pied piper was made from pies. It wasn’t an image for me then, just a fact, one more puzzling piece of information for my five-year-old mind. Now, I try to see it, steam venting from the piper’s slitted nostrils. Inside, the ooze of red filling.

Recently, a friend told me how her cat had killed a mouse. “He left only the face,” my friend said. “You mean he left the mouse’s head?” I asked. “No,” she said. “It was just the face. It was just there, on the bathroom mat.”

Face versus head. That’s different from head or tails, as it isn’t one or the other. Instead, a face is a mask growing backward. It makes a head when you’re ready, a bloom like a point. They wait for you there, all those memories too terrifying to see.

For years, I wondered what I could have done differently for my mother. Could I have made her go to a doctor sooner, get the diagnosis earlier? Should I have argued with the oncologist when he said she had three weeks to live?

But I was barely an adult. Hell was still only in crayon. If I was a pied piper, I was just a sweet jester doll. When I played my plastic flute, I lured myself to myself, since that was the job of my growth then. If I could hear my own music only, that killed no one.

*

Stet is Latin for “let it stand.” It’s a proofreading mark. You write it in the margins when someone suggests an edit, but you disagree. You stet it. And so it remains what it was and becomes what it always shall be.

TK, on the other hand, means “to come.” It’s a placeholder for future text or images. Why not TC? I’ve read that TK stands for to kum, and that editors use non-words on purpose to separate proofreading marks from copy. You write hed for headline and graf for paragraph for the same reason. I never wrote hed or graf when I worked in publishing, but I wrote a lot of TKs.

I was in my twenties. I was mostly to come. But my mother, forever, was stetted. Part of me is always there in the margins with her. I stay with her memory, like a bag full of mouse bones, and sway in the tree of my guilt.

But what did the tree do? It caught and held someone else’s death, like a flute storing music. Must an instrument always be guilty of its song?

To my mother: I thought there was so much to come.