I awake on Christmas Day to find a mouse in the middle of my kitchen floor. This is odd. Mice tend to rush off and hide, not sit and wait for me to decide their end. I approach, wondering if the creature has been poisoned and is so caught up in dying it doesn’t mind someone watching. The mouse has gray fur, a white bib, large ears, black eyes, and a twisted, bloody back leg. I think of the slaughterhouse where I work. My linoleum seems a killing floor where the mouse has come to await the blow to the head, the jolt of electricity, the bolt into the brain.