Short Story | Abigail Pesta

I’d just hailed a cab at the corner and was about to hop in, when I had the strangest sensation. Something was brushing against the back of my left calf. A weight. A tickle. What could it be? It felt a little slimy.

It was an early spring evening in Brooklyn, that time of year when the trees begin to burst with white flowers. My friends and I had just enjoyed a dinner of tapas and discussing obnoxious people.

I shook my leg to dislodge whatever was in my pants. A gray blob came flying out. 

Plop! It landed in a puddle by the curb with a tiny splash. 

A mouse. 

New Yorkers pride themselves on ignoring things. Tuba player on the subway? George Stephanopoulos one barstool over? Seen it all before. But not this time. A man walking by saw the whole thing happen. He stopped and with a look of amazement said, “Holy shit.”

In a state of disbelief, my first thought was that this guy must have thrown the mouse at me. It hadn’t quite registered that it had just rocketed out of my pants leg. 

“Did you just throw a mouse at me?” I said.

“Woah don’t blame me,” he said. “You’re the one with mice in your pants.”

The truth snapped into focus. You don’t throw a mouse at someone, and it magically gets inside their pants. 

The car was waiting so I jumped in and fled the scene.

Sitting in the back of the cab, patting my leg over and over to be sure there wasn’t another mouse or two in there, I began asking myself the big questions. 

Like what just happened?

I thought back over the events of the evening. I’d met up with my friends Kate and Rebecca at a little Spanish restaurant after work. The place had floor-to-ceiling glass doors that opened onto the sidewalk, and we could feel the balmy evening air on our skin. Out on the street, people paraded by in summery dresses and cargo shorts, even if it was still a little too chilly outside for all that.

It was that electric kind of day when suddenly the whole city feels reinvigorated by the end of slush season. We had the best table in the place, right in the front with the vibe of being at a breezy outdoor cafe, but just far enough indoors that the mountain of trash bags on the sidewalk didn’t kill the mood.

Kate told us about a problem she was having with a colleague who sat across from her and crunched on potato chips and Flamin’ Hot Cheetos all day. The snacks were free at her company, a startup already flirting with collapse, and he took full advantage. 

A new freebie had recently entered the snack rotation, crinkly bags of caramel corn and peanuts, and Kate was losing her mind.

“You could use earphones,” I said. 

“But why should I have to?” she said. “He needs to stop crunching in my face. It’s like sitting across from a cow chewing its cud all day.”

“I’m not sure cud is crunchy,” I said. “I think it’s more chewy.”

“Then it’s like a horse eating corncobs all day,” she said. “Crunch, slobber, crunch.”

Pouring herself another glass of sangria, she said her strategy was to sigh loudly as her colleague chomped and crinkled away. But alas, he didn’t seem to get the message.

“He probably can’t hear me through all the crunching,” she said. “Oh and he uses those plastic dental-floss things to pick his teeth, right there at his desk. He thinks nobody notices. What a weirdo.”

“You need to get revenge,” I said. “Put a whoopee cushion on his chair.” 

I had whoopee cushions on my mind because I’d been given one for Christmas by my mom, and I happened to have it with me in my purse. You never know when it might come in handy.

Kate said, “Do whoopee cushions still exist?”

“You can use mine,” I said, opening my purse and pulling out a pink bladder helpfully labeled WHOOPEE CUSHION. “Just make sure to give it back.” 

“You travel with a whoopee cushion?” Rebecca said.

Kate wasn’t familiar with the technology, so I explained how to blow it up, which she did. And then she sat on it. 

That was unwise. 

It let rip with a surprisingly juicy fart. Our fellow diners noticed.

Kate was mortified. “It’s a whoopee cushion!” she said to no one in particular, but also to the whole room, fumbling around and trying to prove it by waving around the now deflated cushion. 

About this time, I discreetly kicked off my shoes under the table. These were five-inch heels, which were basically the uniform at the fashion magazine where I worked. Everyone was always trying not to fall off their shoes. I knew that ditching my shoes meant the bottoms of my pants would unfortunately come into contact with the sticky floor. 

Could that have been when the mouse climbed into my pants? 

We polished off the sangria, and Rebecca decided she wanted a martini. She motioned for the waiter and ordered up the drink. 

“What kind of gin would you like?” the waiter asked her.

Rebecca, who was already kind of sloshed at this point, laughed at the question and said to the two of us, “Doesn’t gin just taste like gin?”

Then she asked the waiter: “What is your cheapest gin?” leaning into the word cheapest.

The waiter was unamused.

“That would be the Gilbey’s,” he said.

“Oh, that sounds really cheap,” she said. “What’s your second-cheapest gin?”

More laughter from Kate and me. More disapproval from the waiter.

“Brokers,” he said. 

“Okay,” Rebecca said. “That sounds like value for money.” 

When the waiter brought the martini, she confirmed with him in perhaps a slightly too loud voice, “Now this is your second-cheapest gin, is that correct?”

“Yes,” he said, and walked away.

When Rebecca finished her drink, we decided we’d better call it a night. We paid the bill, gave the waiter a good tip because it wasn’t his fault he had to ask people the stupid question about their preference in gin, and headed out into the night.

And that’s when it happened. The sensation on my leg. The kick. The flight of a mouse from pants to puddle. The splashdown. The accusation.

So yeah, maybe the mouse had climbed into my pants when I took off my shoes in the restaurant. But wouldn’t I have felt that? 

My pants were very billowy, in keeping with the fashion of the time. They were also cuffed. Had the mouse been hanging out in the cuff? Had my mouse friend been traveling with me all day long?

You can be sure it was not my first encounter with a mouse in New York City. One time a pretty big one (or was it a very small rat?) skittered across the top of my foot on a subway platform. Another time, in one of my first New York apartments, a hovel in Chelsea, I’d watched night after night as a mouse ran back and forth across the floor, zooming along so fast that sometimes it went airborne when it hit a big wrinkle in the carpet. 

Then there was the French restaurant mouse dessert incident. Out for dinner one evening, my date and I quietly informed the waiter that we had seen a mouse running around the dining room floor, from table to table. The waiter didn’t seem surprised at the news. But anyway, when it came time for dessert, I ordered the chocolate mousse but smiled and pronounced it chocolate “mouse,” and the waiter gave us desserts for free.

We got free food that evening and so did the mouse, I suppose, flittering around the floor and I hope not running up anyone’s pants. In the city, all creatures big and small need to be putting self-interest first. 

I once watched a seagull on a sidewalk dragging a slice of pizza that someone had dropped. That was another time where New Yorkers actually stopped and stared. The gull was not going to be denied. And a friend of mine swears that a few years ago, while minding his own business walking past Bed Bath & Beyond, he was crapped on by a hawk. Couldn’t have been a pigeon because the voluminous poop that splashed down on his shoulder could only have come from a bird the size of a pterodactyl, he had observed. 

Today, years later, my friend still tells the pterodactyl story. But guess what, the hawk never gave a single thought to the consequences of its actions. That hawk was all about self-interest.