WE eat mice

Though there was a dim, flickering light. To which her eye, like a dumb bug, was instantly drawn. Across the little living room, in a closet she’d never seen open before, was a…an altar of some kind. Covered in purple cloth. A fat black candle burning at its center, in a mound of its own pungent drippings. As she was drawn to the corpse in the funeral home that day, so to this...this...whatever it was. Unable again, though dimly aware of trespassing, to stop her feet’s forward progress. There were weird things there. Loose cigarettes. Black sunglasses. Some purple flowers in a glass, maybe from the cemetery out back. A weird little statue of a black man in an old-fashioned military uniform, sideways plumed hat and all, head disturbingly too big for body. A plain black wooden cross. A half-empty bottle of some amber liquor. Some saints’ pictures in cheap tin frames: St. Bridget, scribbling away; St. Expedite with walking stick; St. Gerard with lilies and skull.