Horror Story

So last night James and I were laying in bed on our air mattress watching a horror movie. It's called Resolution and is about a guy who goes to a spooky cabin to try and get his buddy off drugs but  all these creepy things start happening.

Guess what else is creepy?

At a quiet part of the movie I hear a rustling noise ... coming from our room!

I tell James and he pauses the movie so we can both listen. He hears it too and gets up, because this is the part of our lives that follows the constructions of genre film: If there's a noise in the night, I'll be damned if I'm the one who's going to get up and check on it.

James peers over a stack of shopping bags holding my clothes and says something like, "you're right" and then tells me he has to take one of the bags outside. I hand him his sweatshirt and he departs.

If I were a better person, I would've followed him outside, but instead I stayed put on our slowly-deflating air mattress, clutched the comforter around my shoulders and listened for more intruders. Feeling a little bit like crying...

He went out on our stoop and started pulling my clutches and scarves out of this bag a piece at a time until the mouse realized, "oh shit, I gotta get out of here." and spun in a circle and jumped out.

"You're going to want to wash this stuff," he said when he returned.

Reader, I'm glad I didn't actually see this. It would have been too much for my tender constitution.

It doesn't look as if there's poo poo threaded through my accessories, but who knows, mice shit everywhere they go, so I'll wash it all anyways.

I was operating under the comforting delusion that our sublet only had one mouse and it resided primarily behind the stove. From now on we're going to keep the bedroom door closed. The scariest thing though is I only heard it because there was a plastic bag on top of the canvas bag he was in, and he was pushing up against it to make the noise. What if he'd been somewhere else, somewhere quieter?!

The movie was pretty good, if you're looking for a Halloween-time flick, at least as much of it as I saw, I fell asleep before the end, which would've never happened if I didn't have James around to take care of the mice. I guess now I can never leave him.
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And now for a status update, because I can feel the curious family emails pouring in already: Yes, we're still subletting, but probably only for a few more weeks - we'll be in our own place by the beginning of December, latest. James will go from full-time freelancer to full-time employee Nov. 1 at his work (yay!). I'm still doing four things at once, I don't know if I can sustain this freelance thing in New York, but I do have a magazine article coming out soonish that I'm excited about. Stay tuned!