Brown was chewing on the unexpectedly salty end of a gummy worm as Flaky explained about the blue light, plugged into a zappy hole in the dining room.
“But how do you know the light is for us?”
“I heard the guy,” Flaky said. Flaky hated people, but Brown saw their occasional usefulness. Nature did not provide salty gummy worms of her own accord.
Flaky was bigger and stronger than Brown, with impressive shoulder muscles and thick, dark gray haunches. He could have been mistaken for a baby rat, in the right lighting.
Flaky bit at an old scab under his left pinky claw, which turned Brown’s stomach. He dropped the worm.
“You finished with that?” Flaky said.
Brown squeaked. “Not yet,” he said, then dragged the worm to the safety of his corner, under the house’s front porch. “What do the humans think this blue light will do?”
“Keep us out of the house, the guy said. His lady didn’t buy it.”
“Me, neither. I’m not afraid of light.”
Brown had been born in that house, under the bedroom radiator, two winters before. Inside, the house still smelled like them, warm and whiskery, and Brown wondered how the blue light would change it.
“Know what really pisses me off?” Flaky said. “It’s almost spring, right? Which means we won’t be in the house as much, like, naturally, right? But they’re going to congratulate themselves, in that human way, about what smart sons of bitches they were to buy a dumb light.”
Flaky was right, of course, but the sugar from the gummy worm was coursing through Brown like electricity, giving him an idea. What if the blue light could light up the home that he and Flaky had made, under the porch, ever since the new people moved in? Brown imagined Flaky and him holding on to one another, unmolested, in the dried leaves and beetle carcasses below the porch, as the light transformed them into fantastical beasts.
“Hey,” Brown said. “We should take it.”
“Take it?”
“Yeah,” Brown said. He wiggled a paw. “See this small claw? Why couldn’t I use this to yank it out, like that raccoon does, when he lifts the lid off of a trash can?”
Flaky’s lipless mouth curled into a mimicry of a smile. “Yes! Then those people will be like, ‘What happened? Aw man, those mice got us good this time!’”
That was not what Brown had been thinking, but he needed Flaky’s strength if he was going to get the blue light and bring it under the porch. Brown was so small that he could hardly lift a rice cracker. As Brown watched Flaky’s rotator cuffs work under his scabrous skin, he felt a jolt of confidence in the plan.
*
Brown and Flaky raced along the gas line and walked up the tunnel carved out of the foam insulation. Into the oven drawer, then they were standing on the cold kitchen tile.
“Follow me,” Flaky said, and Brown skittered after him, Flaky’s tail like a beckoning finger.
In the dining room, the light was even more beautiful than Brown had imagined. Waves of an other-worldly waterfall, or a sci-fi sunset. The blue touched every surface, stroking the table’s legs and blanketing the people’s new carpet, dying it from drab gray to vivid lilac.
They stood on either side of the zappy hole from which the blue light protruded. Up close, the light was less ethereal, and caused an ache to hammer between Brown’s eyes. He didn’t feel repelled, exactly, more like he had been staring into the sun.
“Alright then,” Flaky said. “Let’s get to work.”
But it wasn’t so simple. The light was much bigger than Brown had expected, four times his size at least, and held fast in the zappy hole. Brown could not budge it with his useless thumb, and Flaky’s dominant paw was too raw to be of much use when he tried to yank it out. When Flaky got angry and jumped on top of it, he barely loosened it an inch.
Brown was about to suggest that they go back out to the porch when he saw Flaky sticking his nose against the zappy hole.
“Watch out there, dude,” Brown said. “That’ll zap you.”
“I know that,” Flaky said, defensively, like he definitely hadn’t known that. “How about we chew through these silver pieces?”
“I don’t know.”
“What, you don’t think I could do it?”
“It’s not that. I just—”
“My cousin chewed through the bottom of a rabbit hutch once. And he’s my younger cousin.”
“Oh yeah? Which cousin?”
“You don’t know him. He lives in Canada.”
“Dude,” Brown said. “Let’s go.” But Brown had accidentally threatened Flaky’s manhood. Before Brown could stop him, Flaky opened his jaws around the prong and bit down. When the zap roiled through Flaky, quaking his muscles, Brown didn’t think. He leapt on Flaky’s back and didn’t let go.
*
“Is the big one a rat?”
“I hope not,” the man said. The rodents’ stiffened corpses encircled the ultrasonic rodent repeller like golden retrievers warming themselves in front of a fire.
“I thought they were supposed to be afraid of it,” the woman said. “I didn’t think it would kill them.”
The man squatted down. He looked at the repeller, which was angled downwards and slightly askew. “Me, too. But it worked better than I’d hoped.”
The woman put her hands on her hips and smiled down at her husband’s bald spot. “Nice job, honey.”