Long Burn

The Brown One

When we were living in Pasadena we had two mice as pets, one white and one brown. They were cute little buggers but lived life in the fast lane. The white one swelled up and passed away. Some friends were over and asked us what the remaining mouse’s name was and we said, ‘the brown one.’ They took it to mean ‘The Brown One’ and were really impressed, like we were some kind of artistic geniuses and this mouse was our oracle. It helped that Claudia really was an artist, had gone to a design academy in Munich and had chosen color schemes for several buildings.

Then there was that big earthquake in LA in the early 90s. For some reason the most common time for an earthquake is in the early morning hours, and we were woken up by a sharp bouncing around 5 in the morning, like someone was picking up the bed a couple of feet and dropping it on the floor over and over again. Then the waves started, back and forth like a boat on the water, the apartment building creaking like an old wooden ship, sounds of things falling. We were alright. The fridge and stove had each walked about a foot. We found the glass aquarium where the brown one made her nest broken on the floor. Where was she? In a corner, under a bookcase, with a broken tail. The brown one lived for about a year after that, up to about the time of the riots, with a right angle bend in the middle of her tail.

posted by Matt_J @ 10:02 AM