This is a story about a mouse whose death taught us what it means to live. It’s a story about a mouse as a teacher. About a mouse and a teacher. And a trial. This is a story about all the ways we don’t understand what we’ve done until after we’ve done it. It’s about a murder and a funeral. It’s also a metaphor, because even a mouse can be a metaphor, if looked at in the right flash of light.

At 1:23 pm on November 7 we condemned the mouse to die. This is when the story starts, with death, but, like all good stories, its beginnings have earlier roots. And like all good deaths, it begins with a lesson.

This one was on electricity. It was also on the end, and what happens to our synapses when we’re gone. It was a lesson that began with the idea that all our human interactions are electrical. All our brain waves and muscle movements, all our hopes and dreams, are simply little arcs of electricity shocking us into existence.

We’d been learning about muscles in Mr. Prewett’s senior Science class. This was in the fall but we were already leaning toward graduation and getting out of this God-forsaken town. We were aiming ourselves elsewhere, not knowing at the time we’d always be circling back to see what we were once like, trying to understand how we ended up the way we are.

Mr. Prewett wore glasses so thick we said he could see the future. Really he just observed the present, and what he saw through his thick lenses were teenagers tired of worrying about their futures but too tough to admit it, so they adopted a degree of indifference that kids have been carrying around since the first synapses of the first one arced into adolescence.

So one afternoon when we weren’t paying attention, while Mr. Prewett tried to explain to us how electrical impulses that originate in the brain drive all bodily functions, as our eyes glazed over and we thought of college or summer or what we would do after school that day, as he could see us slipping away toward wherever we would go after we left here, he said, “Electricity can even stimulate muscles after death,” and, when that didn’t fully arouse us, “That’s why men convulse when they’re electrocuted.”

I assume now he meant in movies, and that art imitates real life. We did not think Mr. Prewett had seen an execution, though we would have, at that age, liked him more if he had, even though we did like him very much. We had taken his 9^th grade class too. We had done the egg-drop experiment, climbing to the top of the football press box and dropping our contraptions 50 feet, most of our eggs exploding, reminding me now how difficult it is to convey a concept, like an egg or an idea, across such vast distances. Earlier in the year he had taught us vectors, which I don’t remember much about, except how they can determine the position of one point in space relative to another, which is what writing in general and this essay in particular are about.

But we had gone past learning. We were in our senior year and Mr. Prewett knew we were just marking time. He knew his days of teaching us something new were over, so some afternoons he let us play that paper football game or that game where we broke each other’s pencils. Some days we told jokes and some days we had cut-down fights, though no one ever beat Mr. Prewett. I came close once when I said “You’re so ugly you have to Trick or Treat by mail,” but he responded that I was so ugly I could make a train take a dirt road, and though I’d like to rewrite the scene so I say “ You’re so ugly when you throw a boomerang it doesn’t come back,” that didn’t happen, and Mr. Prewett remained king of the cut-downs.

So in this soft, liminal space before we eased into the rest of our lives, Mr. Prewett said he could prove it.

“Prove what?” said someone, maybe Mike Bryant or Jerry Bradley.

“That muscles move by electrical shock,” he said, pausing just long enough that we were leaning forward. “Even after death.”

In the eager quiet that followed, the kind I’ve gone looking for in every class I’ve ever taught, Mr. Prewett laid out his plan: we would need a test subject, a mouse or a frog or a snake. We would kill it, then hook a small electrical generator to it and send pulses through its body to see its muscles move. We had to kill it in class, he said, because the body only responded to the impulses for a few minutes. After that it was over. Finished. Final. El finito.

I’d like to say there was a moment where we realized the monument of death stood before us, but the collective momentum had not yet struck. As these things go, it would not until years later, when the mundane is rendered monumental, and all our molehills become mountains.

In the silence, Daniel Simpson said he could catch a mouse in his barn and bring it to school the next day. Mr. Prewett told us he had the rest of the equipment, which made us wonder what chemicals and compounds lingered behind the always-locked door in the science room. But the bell rang and we filed out and when we filed in the next day Daniel had a mouse in a big glass jar with holes poked in the lid, and we stood around while it sniffed the air inside and put its little paws on the side of the glass as if looking for a way out.

It was here that the first objection was raised. Heather Hall, who now has a child older than we were back then, said she didn’t want to see it die. Some wit offered she could always leave, but she raised her objection further—we could not kill this creature, she said. It would be inhumane. It would be immoral. We knew what would happen when the impulses hit its muscles because Mr. Prewett had told us, and none of us needed to actually see it happen.

I’d like to contend that Heather was wrong. That we, and by we I mean us humans walking around wondering what we are doing on this earth, have to see it happen. That we do see it happen, every day, and yet we still don’t understand the electricity that flows through us or what happens when it stops, which is, ultimately, what everything is about.

So a chorus of voices shouted Heather down, and that might have been the end of it, but perhaps Mr. Prewett, whose glasses were not quite thick enough to see the future, said if there was one conscientious objector we had to take that into account. Maybe he was as bored as we were, ready to head into summer and the freedom it brings from little shits like us, or maybe he saw some lesson we didn’t—maybe he knew death isn’t the ultimate lesson, only what happens after.

So when someone suggested we have a trial to determine the mouse’s fate, Mr. Prewett agreed. Heather would be the defense. Matthew Foy was named prosecutor, and Cliff McAnally and Sherry Wann were the judges. We would have opening statements tomorrow, and the mouse would have a short reprieve until then.

And look, I don’t remember all the arguments Heather and Matt made the next day. Matt teaches high school music now, and I doubt he’s ever dealt with the death of a mouse in his classes. If I had to guess I’d say he doesn’t use those humane mousetraps at home, nor does he drive captured mice out into the woods to be released, as I sometimes do. Heather’s big mistake, if I remember correctly, was assuming we all shared the same morals she did, when in reality we were, like far too many of us, trying to find some entertainment, even at the expense of others. I remember making a point to ask why we got the mouse in the first place, as if to remind everyone. I remember asking Mr. Prewett if he thought lessons about how our brains control our bodies were important, if learning about death was important to learning about life.

What I’m saying is, I wanted the mouse to die. I framed my questions in such a way as to help Matt in his prosecution. I used words to move the class toward the verdict I wanted, which is what I’m doing now. There’s a verdict coming, and it isn’t the one you think it is, because we can’t ever see it coming until it gets here.

But I wanted to see it happen, there in the classroom. I didn’t yet know what it was like to lose something. I was sad for reasons I can’t recall. I’m sure most of these reasons seem now so small they couldn’t even fill the holes Daniel had poked in the jar lid, but maybe we need to see suffering to understand why we are so unsettled. Maybe we need to see the last throes of death to understand life. Maybe we constantly need to revisit the past in an attempt to see the future.

And I don’t want to belabor the point, so let me just say that Heather lost. Cliff and Sherry went out into the hall and came back in with a death verdict. They didn’t write a dissent, but I’d bet all the mouse shit that had accumulated in the bottom of the jar that it would have said they just wanted to see it die.

When the verdict came back, Heather asked to be excused from class. Mr. Prewett, who later said the whole situation turned out to be an important lesson on moral values, along with learning about the electricity that runs through us and makes us what we are, took some chemical—formaldehyde, maybe, or some other compound back there in that locked room with the beakers and burners and powders and potions—and soaked a cotton ball with it. Daniel opened the lid and Mr. Prewett dropped the cotton ball in and a few moments later the mouse curled up and died.

In my high school yearbook there’s a huge picture of Dustin Blankenship, my best friend on that day 30 years ago, shocking the mouse after it died. And it did twitch a little, as Mr. Prewett told Dustin where to hold the electrodes. Its legs twitched when he touched it and we took turns shocking the mouse until it eventually quit moving, no matter how high we turned up the machine.

And afterward, as men will, we turned the machine on ourselves. Mr. Prewett said the same principle worked with us as well, so we held the electrodes to our arms and watched our muscles jump, but maybe we were only trying to feel something. Daniel held the electrodes up to his temples and said he could see flashes behind his eyes, and when Dustin held them to my knee I kicked a desk so hard it lifted up. For the rest of the class, while the mouse lay dead, we kept shocking each other, watching all our involuntary movements, all the ways we don’t know what we are doing, only following impulses sent to us from the thing atop our necks we never understand.

The truth is, there’s always some electricity swimming through us, until there isn’t. In the yearbook Mr. Prewett is standing next to Dustin, guiding him. Another picture shows the funeral we held for the mouse. We buried him in a little box outside the Science room. Kelly McClendon played “Taps” on her trumpet. Mr. Prewett read from Genesis that unto dust shalt thou return. The funeral procession wound down the hallways of the old high school, past the Typing classroom where the typewriters were ticking away, as if everyone inside had a story they wanted to tell.

So here’s the story I want to tell: 13 years later, after I had moved away and was learning how to write stories about the past, Mr. Prewett was hit by a car and killed one evening jogging along the main street of my small hometown.

The night he died my mother called to tell me. And here’s the way synapses in the brain work: they’re still there, years later. Still firing and connecting and vectoring from one place to another, still reminding us we were once moved. So I told her about the mouse and the trial and the funeral and after I finished, in that tender space somewhere between denial and acceptance, she told me he had died instantly, though maybe she just didn’t want me to wonder whether the doctors tried to shock him back to life.