We caught him one day after school, when the mouse was scuttling under my shed—something like “look, there’s a mouse; let’s get him.” And Kris, my neighborhood best friend, got him, cupped the mouse with his bare hands—the kid was brave—just scooped him in with one attempt like he caught mice before.

“Find a box,” Kris shouted. So, I ran to the recycling bin outside my house and searched, not caring about glass shards or sharp tin lids; this was urgent. I found a shoebox from the pair of newly bought sneakers I was wearing, ones that must have been for the new school year, so this must have been in September.

We met back at the shed. I opened the empty box. Kris slowly sank his clasped hands into the box. He released his palms first, and then the mouse slipped out, a soft thud that looked like a brown rock. He said, because clearly he was the expert, “we need dirt, need grass.” Kris closed the shoebox.

We rushed to the front yard. Kris yanked grass from the lawn as if pulling out strands of someone’s hair. I then dug where those clumps of ground were, pushing my cuticles back, dirt under my nails. With one well-measured handful of earth each, we returned to the shed, to the shoebox that was slightly moving.

“Be careful not to let him out,” Kris whispered. I lifted the lid, and the mouse sniffed me. With the patience of an hourglass, I poured in the dirt, peppering our mouse. Kris pinched the clumps of grass and placed them in the corners of the box. We created our mouse’s cardboard habitat and agreed by glancing at each other, missing-toothed smiles, that this was all right.

We sat crossed-legged in my backyard with the box between us. We watched our pet in his new home—watched how he sifted the dirt with his paws, watched how his whiskers poked at the mess of grass, watched how his tail writhed like a worm, watched how his black eyes met ours, how they planted there, watching us, as if lovingly, as if knowing we saved him from the wide-mouth gulp of some garden snake.  

I don’t know how long we sat there, but we did sit there for a long time. We sat until dusk, until the clouds rolled over, until the sun blurred as if leaving a contrail of color, as if a stroke of paint, a rust orange, that smeared above the tree line—and the changing sky and the changing leaves, and the perfect autumn day.

We put the lid on, the square edges fitting neatly into the grooves of the box.

* * *

At some point the next day when Kris and I were at school and passed each other in the hallway, that in that moment when our eyes linked, a realization found us, and it punched us in the gut, and our eyes showed the shock, the panic—the kind of fear a kid realizes that they’ll be in deep shit when they get home because they left the door open, and the dog or the cat got out—the type of trouble that lingers in a kid’s belly all school-day, and the kid spits out “shit” incessantly because the kid knows their parents are absolutely going to kill them.

We didn’t even have to say it to each other, but we knew it; we knew we forgot the air holes.

After the school bus dropped us off, Kris and I returned to the shed in a hurry. The shoebox was hidden in a crevice between the ground and the shed’s wire mesh. We hoped the box would move the way it did the day before when it was resting in the dirt. We hoped our mouse would remember us, our scent, and hustle back and forth the way a pup does when its family comes home. We hoped, most of all, that he’d still be alive. 

The shoebox was motionless. And we decided then that we should name our mouse before we found him the way he was. We named him Booger, for we were children, and this absurdity made us laugh though we really wanted to cry. 

Booger died in the shoebox. His body lay curled up like a C. Kris and I stared at Booger for some time, the same as we did when he was alive that yesterday. It wasn’t the first time we had seen something dead, like an animal—roadkill, but there was a difference between the ogling fascination with the death of a thing and the mourning of a life. 

Inside the shed, I retrieved a hand shovel. Kris and I picked a spot to bury Booger that was not far from where we first found him. We dug the grave soundlessly, as if we were Louis Creed and Jud Crandall, though we didn’t know who those men were, but knew some breath of the story—a burial place where pets come back to life. 

We tied a sapling to a twig and formed a cross. We jabbed the cross into the dirt. We laid Booger to rest.

Kris and I routinely visited Booger’s grave site. We agreed to always say a little something about how good of a mouse he was. For the first week, we paid our respects daily, but the weeks following, we missed a day, and so on and so on, and we quickly became interested in whatever newness of childhood. We thought maybe death was like that, a thing you think about but then just don’t.

* * *

Sometimes these memories, like the one of Booger, serve as place holders, as markers to moments in our lives that we remember in events: that school bus accident; that blizzard of ‘96; that teacher who got fired; that time when Kris and I found a mouse, and a day later, buried him; and about that one kid whose dad died suddenly.

That kid was Kris, and his dad died of a heart attack, and I think it was around the same time we lost Booger.

* * *

Kris’s dad had a heart attack while playing tennis. Kris never told me this, but us kids in the neighborhood found out from our parents and then told it to each other with the tone of a cautionary tale, love your parents while you have them.

I don’t remember when this exactly happened, but I remember the emotion with the exactness of remembering Booger—I remember the brown fur and stillness of Booger’s body joined to the sadness that loomed in our neighborhood streets, that these two memories are attached, no matter how many years have passed, and how many times I’ve pictured it.

When I was a kid, childhood was just this—a collection of events that we held on to, that we glued into a timeline of becoming. So that same year, maybe even that same month, Kris lost his forty-something-year-old dad, we had buried our pet, my first pet, Booger.

* * *

It wasn’t September anymore because I remember being on the school bus, bundled in a jacket, cold in the morning; I remember approaching Kris’s bus stop, and the chill of the window, and then using my finger to draw a smiley face on the window’s condensation and hoping Kris would see it and maybe smile for the first time in a long time—smile like the way he did when we found Booger. But that wide-eyed and adventurous boy he once was, the boy who caught a mouse in his hands, the boy who was like an encyclopedia of entomology, the boy who collected fistfuls of bugs in his pockets, who rode his bike without hands before anyone else could, who did any dare, even double-dog dares, just to make his friends laugh, that boy was no longer himself. Then, I didn’t understand, and I thought Kris and I would mourn the same way, that we’d think about it for a while, be sad, like how we mourned Booger, that we’d move on and somehow still be the happy boys we were, but Kris changed as quickly as those seasons changed, as fast as autumn was gone and winter was upon us, and Kris would never be that happy boy again.

* * *

I remember wanting to unbury Booger, an urge lingered inside of me to look in on death, to be sure that gone was gone. I wanted to understand how Kris felt. I wondered if he ever had the same questions about life when it is no longer with us, about our mouse, about his dad. As the winter turned to spring, then summer, then another September again, Kris was really never the same—that the boy I knew was buried somewhere and someone else emerged, returned different, a body just adrift.