Mice have moved by Jazimina MacNeil

Mice have moved into my bed. Nobody taught them that it’s bad manners to defecate on somebody else’s pillow, even if you are a squatter, and my dad leaves grapes for them on a napkin every night, so they arrive fully loaded. My bedroom door stays shut most always now except on rare masked visits when I rummage for an old pair of slippers; my mother and brother and I appear in the bed, piled together under a circle of light, my mother reading sleepily then beginning to narrate a dream as it overtakes her, until we nudge her awake.