Mousetraps by Zach Williams, 2024
The magic trick:
Spinning the mundane into the frightening
It is Friday, and we’re wrapping up our week of Zach Williams stories from his Beautiful Days collection. I hope you’ve enjoyed them. He certainly is an author who has moved onto my radar in terms of tracking what he does next.
“Mousetraps” might be my favorite of the collection, though I will say the story kind of expands into a surprising place and the third act is a little bit weird and I didn’t love it. But I loved the setup and the first half of this story so much that it almost didn’t matter.
This is a story that demonstrates how conflict, fear, and insecurities can arise anywhere, at any time for us these days. In the story, our narrator wanders into a perfectly described independently owned packed-to-the-rafters local hardware store. He’s shopping for mouse traps. This should not be a difficult errand, but it quickly becomes very weird, stressful, and creepy. What began as a simple run to the hardware store suddenly morphs into a Twilight Zone episode.
I love the way even the most mundane setup in Williams’s hands becomes weird and frightening. And that’s quite a trick on Williams’s part.
The selection:
He wrinkled his brow. “Not kill?” he asked.
“Like a humane trap, or – what do they call them, a catch and release?”
“Catch and release,” he said, and grinned at the boy. “Like a fisherman, Anthony.”
I looked over my shoulder, wishing for a glimpse of the street. The way he studied me, I felt naked, somehow, insufficient, like we all understood but couldn’t say that I should have known not to come here, into this world of men and tools, hard measurements, the unbending laws of real things. I wished I’d dressed differently; I wished I’d worn different shoes.
He said, “You want humane traps?”
“Do you have them?”
“You want to set the mouse loose – where, in the park? At the playground?”
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