Cameron MacKenzie: CATSUIT • Cleaver Magazine

Cameron MacKenzie
CATSUIT

Every time Ally’s mom’s boyfriend fed his ball python, he played “Mouth for War,” by Pantera. My friend Tyler and I would squat beside the snake’s aquarium under the hot light and watch the little mouse as it scampered through the wood chips. The poor thing ran one way and then the other, trying to figure out where he was, while the snake lifted its head and flicked out its tongue.

The thing about Pantera is the clarity of the mix—every instrument is clean and aligned with no fuzz or mud or sloppy transitions. You’ve got Phil Anselmo screaming, Dimebag Darrell’s guitar divebombing, and Vinnie Paul on drums like a platoon of Gatling guns. You can feel the serrated shapes of every sound back up in your gums. I wondered if the mouse could hear it while he nosed the glass walls. It didn’t even occur to me if the snake could, unwinding itself as it did, moving less like an animal and more like an intestine removed and placed inside of a box.

I’d dated Ally the year before, in 7th grade. “Dated” meaning we’d held hands regularly in the halls. I was so chock full of hormones that I could barely speak when she touched me. At night after dinner I refused to take her calls, and sat shaking on the living room couch with the expectation of what she might suggest or demand or require. When she showed up one day at Seneca Ridge Middle School in a black catsuit, I was apoplectic. I couldn’t look her in the eye. I was ashamed for her and for myself and appalled that every movement she made in her chair gripped at that new thing I had been hiding in the back of my chest. But I gathered myself, swallowed all the noise and, after biology class, I placed my hand, gingerly and with great terror, on the rounded undercurve of her ass. I patted that tensile rump like a sausage in the casing, and as I did so Ally looked up at me, and she smiled. But it wasn’t enough. She broke up with me a few weeks later, meaning she was holding hands with another boy which was, to me, in all honesty, an enormous relief.

The snake moved around the mouse like a snake would, wide and behind and to the right, and the mouse still wasn’t any wiser, its little paw pads pressed up against the glass. I was looking at the mouse’s two small and crenulated and perfect teeth that, I realized, could have only been formed by the alien decision of a larger mind when the snake jerked up and around like a whip and then rolled, the wood chips scattering, the mouse snatched, removed, caught up in the rolling green spiral that knocked stupidly against the back of the glass. Phil kept screaming and Dimebag Darrell dropped down from the heights as the snake bore in and Ally’s mom’s boyfriend and my buddy Tyler both shouted at once.

“Look at his balls,” they said, pointing at the rear end of the mouse that stuck out from the coils. “They’re huge. They’re gonna pop, dude! His balls are gonna pop.”

But I knew they weren’t. I knew there was something that would come in, right at the last possible second, and put a stop to it.

Cameron MacKenzie’s work has appeared in Salmagundi, Plume, CutBank, and The Michigan Quarterly Review, among other places. Kirkus Reviews called his first novel, The Beginning of His Excellent and Eventful Career, “original, poignant, brutal, and beautiful.” His collection of short fiction, River Weather, was praised by The Rumpus as “riveting.” His book of flash fiction is forthcoming from Alternating Current Press. He lives and works in Roanoke, Virginia, and you can find him online at cameronmackenzie.org.