Archive 501
Vivian Galván García
If you give a mouse an electrical wire…
I am sitting here in one of the last fully functioning rolling chairs in this school, five layers of clothing on my back, two layers of socks on my feet, shivering to the bone. Our large, iridescent red space heater was taken from us because the class up in 206 was craving the heat more than Ryder and I here with our rotting, complete-lemon of a space heater. I just read that mice are responsible for more than a quarter of all house fires due to chewing electrical wires in the walls, but then my fingers got too cold to type despite my interest. These massive 2001-esque machines have become a currency in this space, being traded and tracked from classroom to classroom, yearned for like nothing else. I too, am craving this heat, in fact, I think this need for so much more warmth than we currently have is a symptom. I want this heat, we all do.
There is a room deep below the ground floor of our school; it is the storage room to the storage room to the darkroom and it exists in the single most isolated place in the school, encrusted with years of photographic chemical spillage and mouse shit and it is what I believe to be ground-zero for all the mice that call this school home. I find myself having such kinship with this space, for I have always struggled with the words to define how I exist within this school; it wasn’t until I was developing my film and hearing the sweet mice chatter away in the back storage room that I realized we were quite exactly one in the same. We the mice are allowed to exist here under conditional terms: to be seen, but not seen to the point where we disrupt or dismantle or disturb. We move ourselves to this microcosmic network of existence and we create space where we can, moving quietly and chattering away at the outskirts of these hidden spaces. I know we mice crave warmth too, warmth exactly the same as I.
This warmth grows slowly throughout the underbelly, such a strong collective force, therefore always built on a stronger basis than the dead school which it consumes, suffocating that steel-concrete individuality that is seemingly undying. It grows a little more when all of us inhabitants seem to come back into these cold, cold to the bone, spaces every morning a little more deflated, losing blood just enough so that function is sustained but far too much to be sustainable. I lost too much blood today, more than normal, I feel like the pace has been quickening and I know I’m not alone.
Deep in the depths of this storage room2 there’s a various assortment of electrical equipment, old water heaters, and pressurized tanks running just inches above the beige tiled floor. Quite a fire hazard, if you ask me. So I stand in this room, my skin cracking and blistering around my thumbs and my fingertips pushing the stitchings of my pockets; I sit at front desk where I’m shaking and I can barely type effectively, the violent cold is deep-rooted, and I begin to have a beautiful vision. My fingertips grow hot.
I am in this space of darkroom undercommon, sitting on some iridescent floor, my mice friends curling up frantically beside me, staring up to a ceiling of orange-pink light and disco balls. It’s warm. In fact, it’s hot. There’s a sappy, sugary, smoke seeping in through the cracks of the door frame and a roaring, a sweet cracking of immense embers filling our ears softly like song. Breathing becomes slow, sedated, things slip underwater in a lapping wave repeatedly crashing with urgent delicacy. We all breathe in collectively, out collectively, this underbelly is in motion. The haze grows and grows and particles of ash dance off the warm light from the disco ball, making it seem as though there’s glitter in the air. This is the heat we’ve been craving, it becomes us, we’ve birthed it.
Sweetness washes over us, our door is never overcome, only chromatic ash remains outside, and I look down at my paws to find a broken wire sitting between them and the taste of metal in my mouth.