Nest

Twice decorated Philly police officer Ephraim Lancaster…Thirty three years on the Force and a paragon of the community encompassed by District 5. Family man and veteran, FOP executive board member, leader of multiple volunteer church committees, and not so proud owner of a set of choppers fully engaged in the process of putrefaction.

Ephraim’s teeth resembled small, black pebbles slick with ooze… cracked and glistening with infection that secreted from deep in the base of his brown gums; the smell that emanated from his mouth was like fetid garbage stirred into the guts of a road kill cat on a mid-August highway. It wasn’t that the Philadelphia Police Department didn’t have a great dental plan, it was just that Ephraim was terrified of dentists…so much so that he had let what at first were manageable issues decades before go well past the point of no return.

More often than not, (though he’d never have admitted it), he was in a condition of unrelenting agony, and his breath had made him self-conscious to the point where he tried to avoid conversations at close quarters and chewed perennially on huge wads of Juicy Fruit gum in an effort to mask the funk.

Early morning at the station on the 8 to 8 shift found Officer Lancaster gripping the edge of his desk spitting bloody mucous into a metal trashcan, each expectoration accompanied by a sharp exhalation of pain. He was able to suffer uncensored during these early shifts; It was rare that anyone else was ever in the building at this time, and he had virtually the entire place to himself.

As he wiped the blood from his mouth he heard it again… A faint scrabbling, raspy sound whose location he could not immediately pinpoint. He had first heard it around 2am, and chalked it up to the branches of the old sycamore tree on the front lawn of the station; brushing up against the bricks and eaves in a passing breeze. But this time, he was quite certain that it was coming from somewhere inside the building. Massaging his jaw and cheekbones with the heel of his right hand, he sat quietly, waiting to key into the sound and trace it to its source. After a minute or so, he heard it again….this time, slightly louder. It was a sound like the burning of paper or the crinkling of a cellophane wrapper…sometimes almost imperceptible, and then the next moment, clear as a bell.

The fluorescent lights blinked as officer Lancaster pushed himself back from his heavy wooden desk and slowly stood up, determined now to find the origin of the noise. He made his way stealthily toward the hallway that lead to the station lunch room and stood motionless in the entranceway…Yes, he could hear it. Very distinctly now…somewhere in the hallway, he thought. He clenched his jaw involuntarily as he leaned his head into the hallway and a hot lava needle of blinding pain swam up the side of his neck and through his eustachian tubes before exploding into a cascade of fractured white light at the center of his forehead. He almost passed out from the pain, and leaned against the corner of the hallway entrance for a minute or two before inching his way forward into the passage. Seven or eight feet into the hallway, Ephraim paused by a small, slatted HVAC vent set into the wall just above the scuffed and time-worn baseboard…the sound was definitely coming from behind the wall just beyond the vent. He pulled a small Swiss army knife from his pocket and unfolded a small flat head screw driver, now crouching down close in front of the vent cover. As Ephraim unscrewed the vent from the wall, the sound became louder; a rustling crescendo, and now…low beeps, like tiny bicycles honking as they were being driven through packing peanuts…Ephraim slowly removed the plate.

Pulling his flashlight from his belt, he turned it on and aimed it into the space behind the vent. He immediately saw a fleshy, squirming, organic mass that briefly put him off guard but which he quickly realized was just a mouse nest; a litter of about 10-12 pups, virtually blind and rolling around helplessly on torn scraps of old magazine pages and newspaper likely purloined from the break room by their vigilant mother. Officer Lancaster knew that they wouldn’t stand a chance in the station building as soon as the clerks or the janitors heard them roiling in the walls; they’d be thrown into a garbage can, flushed down the toilet, or at worst crushed underfoot by one of Ephraim’s more vulgar colleagues who had no time for compassion for ‘vermin’. Ephraim also knew that he couldn’t allow any of those things to happen. He went back to his desk and retrieved his hat. He gently extracted the makeshift nest and litter from the vent, placed the pups one by one into his cap, and covered them over with his handkerchief. As the clerks and staff began to arrive a few minutes before 8am, Officer Ephraim Lancaster quickly slipped out of the station with the cap full of mice, spent the morning preparing them a sturdier and more comfortable nest at his basement workstation, and dutifully fed each one of them individually with a small paint brush, the bristles of which he had soaked in half and half.

*****

The following evening, Officer Lancaster was again on the 8 to 8. Around 1:00 am, he temporarily abandoned a half eaten American cheese on Wonder Bread sandwich at his desk, and made his way to the men’s room to apply clove oil to his throbbing teeth and gums. The pain was particularly bad this evening and the initial application of the oil felt like a ground glass glaze in his mouth, though it quickly took effect, numbing the pain at least enough so that he could scarf down the rest of his dinner. Ephraim made his way back to his desk, sat down, picked up his sandwich and took a large bite. He immediately spit out the chunk of sandwich; the bread was soaked with a liquid that had turned it a faint amber in color, and the clump that fell from his mouth was peppered with small, brown, lozenge-shaped objects lodged into the wet, white bread. He immediately looked up at the ceiling thinking that maybe there was a pipe leaking above his desk (it certainly wouldn’t have been the first time!), but as he did, he caught a small, quickly moving blur in his peripheral vision that immediately drew his eyes toward the empty desk a few feet across the aisle from his. It was the most curious thing…there sitting on top of a pile of manila folders stuffed with reports in process was a large mouse. The mouse stood up on its back legs and stared directly at Ephraim; it’s black eyes glittered in the light of the old metal high intensity desk lamp, and it let out a sudden low squeak accompanied by a short burst of piss and two brown turds the size of chiclets which leisurely fell from its ass and rolled onto the surface of the desk. Ephraim was astonished. The mouse let out a hellish, metallic screech like the sound of train brakes and jumped from the desk to the wall ; scurrying up and into a space between the fiberglass drop ceiling panels and the aluminum frame that held them into place. Ephraim looked down at the wet sandwich and felt sick rising quickly from the pit of his stomach and into his throat. He jumped from his desk and lunged towards the bathroom but before he could reach it, long fluorescent bulbs began raining down on his head and shoulders… the light fixtures careened back and forth, a blurred flash of brown moved quickly inside the hoods, pushing the lamps out of their sockets and down onto Officer Lancaster in a rain of broken glass and white phosphorous powder. Ephraim bounced back and forth against the walls of the hallway, spinning into the break room where a pile of wet tomatoes, rancid lettuce and mayonnaise soaked food wrappers had been pulled from the trashcan and deliberately left in the entranceway. His feet went out from under him and the last thing he saw before his head hit the floor was an image of writhing mouse pups deeply inserted from elsewhere into his mind’s eye.

As Officer Lancaster regained consciousness, he heard a loud crunching and grinding sound filling his head…he rolled painfully onto his back and realized that the mouse was now buried halfway into his left ear, tearing away at the cartilage, making it’s way in toward the drum and the membranes and bones that protected his brain. He sat up and ripped the mouse from his ear, throwing it across the break room and against the wall where it slid down to the floor, temporarily stunned.

Officer Lancaster and the mouse stared at each other from across the room, their sides moving rapidly in and out with heavy, labored breaths…blood matted in the mouse’s fur, and trickling in ropey tendrils from Ephraim’s ear. As he watched the mouse, an image seemed to intrude into his mind; it was like watching a movie on an old Zenith black and white television whose screen had been smeared with a thin coating of vaseline…it was the same image that he had seen before his head had hit the floor…the nest; the pups…the mouse was showing him.

Ephraim stood up slowly and leaned for a minute against the break room table until the dizziness and nausea passed…he tried to think it, “I understand…wait here”. The mouse just watched him and didn’t move. He made his way down the hall and out to the front vestibule of the station. As he locked the station door from the outside he saw that the mouse was now sitting on his desk, watching him. He drove the four blocks to his house and retrieved the nest.

Twenty minutes later, Officer Lancaster was back in the station house, and sat an open satchel filled with the pups and clean nesting on the floor against his desk. He backed up a few feet, and soon, the mouse crept out from the mounds of paper and went into the satchel, inspecting, connecting, and determining the state of her young. She poked her head out of the satchel and watched him carefully…Ephraim had the distinct feeling that she was trying to give him something…that she wanted to give him a gift…something to thank him for what he had done and make up for the pain that she had errantly caused him. It was the oddest feeling…image after image flashed through his mind, but it was as if she were scrolling through his brain looking for the appropriate quid pro quo. Ephraim felt his head suddenly enveloped in a luminescent glow, and his body began to resonate pleasantly; With an overwhelming feeling of complete and utter joy, he picked up the satchel and took the mouse and her pups to the municipal park whose margins began a block from the station, depositing them safely in a hollow underneath an old tree. The station was a wreck; as best he could, he quickly cleaned up the trash and the glass, the blood…he would figure out a way to explain what was left.

*****

Officer Lancaster called in sick the next day, and then took two weeks on top of that; He had plenty of time…he had barely used any of it in over thirty years. When he finally went back to the station, everyone was in complete shock to see him; his teeth were gone…the gnarled, stinking stubs of decay were gone, replaced with a beautiful and absolutely perfect set of gleaming choppers; his gums were pink and healthy, the pain he had endured for so many years…completely gone. He explained to his colleagues how he had gone to a new dentist out of state to finally have the work done, and how happy he was with the result. His old teeth had begun to fall out the day after the ‘incident’ and within a week the new set were almost completely grown in…the mouse’s gift. There was only one catch…Ephraim now kept a block of pine wood in a locked desk drawer and, when no-one was around, he would gnaw on it for 15 to 20 minutes at a time to be certain his incisors didn’t grow too long; they grew quickly, and he had to be on top of it…an inconvenience for sure, but who was he to look a gift mouse in the mouth?