In the morning I put them back

 She mentioned the mouse first. 

“Mice.” she corrects me, sorry. The shortness of the word emphasises the plurality inherent in its meaning. The ones that she catches, stabs and keeps underneath her bed. I ask if she uses mousetraps. 

She shakes her head. 

“I want to feel their little bodies in my hands,” she explains, matter-of-factly, “so stabbing is my favourite.”

She tilts her little head, thinking for a minute. Her front teeth make indentations into her bottom lip and her teeth jut out, rat-like. If she was old enough she would have frown lines by now. 

“Or strangling, if my hands are the only thing I have to hand.” She giggles without using her hand to cover her mouth, leaving her teeth on show. The skin on her lips is flaky and peeling, despite the nibbling.

I ask how often she sees mice. How many she’s caught. 

“And they’re all under your bed!” I can’t help but exclaim when she reveals the number. Oddly, it’s lower than I was expecting. 

“Don’t they smell?”

“Yep.” she replies, staring out the window. “But not as much as the snakes.” 

I jump when she turns around, but only after she hisses. She smiles and rotates her neck back to where it was. The inquietude lingers. The snakes are also, as I learn later, dead. They too are kept beneath where she sleeps.

“I stab them too.” she says when asked how one would go about killing a snake. Her answer is delivered calmly, the same way one might answer when asked how they’re doing since the recent passing of their late mother, with whom they weren’t particularly close. 

“They leave scales all over my bedroom floor. It’s really very annoying,” she adds when she glances back over her shoulder and notices my expression. 

As I struggle to meet and maintain her gaze I imagine their corpses, of drastically different - and distinct - shapes and sizes lying under her own little sleeping body. As dormant as a door mouse. 

In my mind the bodies of the snakes splay like tendrils, neat deaths lined up in rows and muddled into an amorphous heap by the hands of a child. The smaller bodies of the mice sit atop the pile, reminiscent of candles on a birthday cake. Suddenly I have a horrifying image of her setting fire to the whole mass, burning the bodies - both mammal and reptile - until scales become indistinguishable from fur that singes into blackened clumps of ash. In my mind she raises her child-sized foot and steps on the embers, rubbing and smudging them into the carpet before I can stop her, grab her forearm just above her wrist, and tell her “no, hey, stop that!”

“But how do you sleep in there with the stench of it all?” I press on. I will her to answer, her verbal explanations easier to deal with than her laughter. 

“Each night I move them,” she shrugs, as if it were nothing. 

“All of them?!” I think. 

“And in the morning?” I ask. 

She turns away from the window and looks up at me. Her expression inquires and then decides in the affirmative, without awaiting any participation from me, whether or not I’m stupid. 

She laughs, one single laugh in the high pitched sing-song voice of someone who is still a long way from adulthood. Then she sighs and rolls her eyes in a gesture that seems too mature for her young face. 

“Oh,” she says, blinking sweetly beneath her eyelashes, “In the morning I put them back”.