was fond of saying. “I mean, look at that face! How could I have said no!” The snake would flick his split ribbon of tongue, and his mistress would dandle the scales beneath his chin. “He’s saying, ‘Hello, new friend. Nice to meet you!’ ”
But the friends weren’t so sure. When the serpent coiled, they jumped and fretted, reactions that left the mouse feeling almost unbelievably special—exotic, really, which was different from eccentric. To qualify for the latter, all you needed was a turban and an affinity for ridiculously large beads or the color purple. To be exotic, on the other hand, one had to think not just outside the box but outside the world of boxes.
“You’re not afraid of my snake,” the mouse would insist. “You’re afraid of the idea of him. Why, this little fellow wouldn’t strike if his life depended on it. Haven’t I explained that?” She’d then describe how he slept at the foot of her bed and woke her each morning with a kiss. “He says, ‘Get up, Mommy. It’s time to start the day!’ ”
The snake was the smartest, the handsomest, the most thoughtful creature that had ever lived. The way he lay in the sun or stared dumbly into space for hours on end—it was uncanny. “He thinks he’s one of us,” the mouse told her friends, who responded with increasingly forced smiles. In time she stopped using the word “pet,” as it seemed demeaning. The term “to own” was banished as well, as it made it sound as though she were keeping him against his will, like a firefly trapped in a jar. “He’s a reptile companion,” she took to saying, and thus, in time, he became her only companion.
This suited the mouse just fine. “I never had anything in common with them anyway,” she said. “Not even the ones my own age.” The snake blinked as if to say, All we need is each other, and the mouse reached out to hug his slender neck. It was almost spooky how like-minded they were: On the weather, on the all-important hoard or binge question, the two were most definitely on the same page. Both liked weekends, both hated owls; their opinions differed only when it came to food. “Won’t you at least try a bit of grain?” the mouse had asked when the snake was very young. He wouldn’t, though, preferring instead a live baby toad. How he could eat these things was beyond her. She’d taken a bite once, just to see what it was like, and the ghost of it, viscous and fishy, had lingered in her mouth for days.
You couldn’t expect a youngster, especially such a vulnerable one, to hunt his own food, and so the mouse did it for him. Aside from baby toads, she’d fetched him a robin’s egg and a very young mole, which, like everything else, he ate whole. “My goodness,” she said. “Slow down. Taste!”
In those first few months, their lunch was followed by a speech-therapy session. “Can you say, ‘Hello, mouse friend’? Can you say, ‘I love you’?”
Eventually she saw the chauvinism of her attempt. Why should he learn to speak like a rodent? Why not the other way around? Hence she made it her business to try and master snake. After weeks of getting nowhere she split her tongue with a razor. This didn’t make it any easier to communicate, but it did give them something else in common.
The two were in front of the fireplace one afternoon, softly hissing at each other, when someone knocked on the door. It was a toad, and after a great sigh at the inconvenience, the mouse stepped onto the front stoop to greet her. Even without the mimeographed flyers under her arm, anyone could have guessed why she was here: it was that “long-suffering mother” look so common to amphibians, who had children by the thousands and then fell apart when a handful were sacrificed to a higher cause.
“I’m sorry to barge in on you this way,” the toad said, “but a few of my babies has taken off and I’m just about at my wit’s end.” She blew her nose into her open palm, then wiped the snotty hand against her thigh. “They’s girls as well as boys. Nine in all, and wasn’t a one of them old enough to fend for themselves.”
It was this last part that tested the mouse’s patience—fend for themselves—as if a toad needed any particular training. They hatched, they