Micro Memory

At Aunt Sharron's, the summer I turned five, my cousins found some baby mice. I thought at first they were toy plastic pigs, because mice are born without hair. We showed Aunt Sharron, we thought they were sweet and I hoped to keep them for pets. Instead, she threw all the babies- far younger than me- over the fence like the garden snails. I knew without asking that this was not to send them along to live somewhere else, but to splatter their little pink bodies on the hot sidewalk.