I GOT A CAT TO SOLVE A MOUSE PROBLEM—and Found Something Else Entirely...

Bluebottles & Dustbunnies:

A Southern Gothic War Story

(Told by a Cat)

IN THE FALL OF 2012 my family and I moved from the suburbs into an antebellum home (c. 1801) in Franklin, Tennessee. Tall ceilings. Long hallways. Mantled fireplaces. Trapdoors. Wide-planked wood floors. It was beautiful and alive in ways I couldn’t quite explain. 

The antebellum "Sweet Home" in Franklin, TN

We were leasing it from an octogenarian named Livingfield More, a World War II veteran. He took kindly to me because he had served as an American guard at Dachau in 1945, and I had visited the Dachau Concentration Camp twice as a child. The house carried his history—its austerity, its discipline. It felt ordered but not entirely controlled. 

My brother & me in front of the ovens of Dachau (c.1979)

And then there were the mice. Not one or two (you never only have one mouse), but enough to make it clear this wasn’t just a nuisance—it was a system. Something was happening beneath the surface of what we could see. 

This photo goes without saying.

So, we did what people do. We adopted a cat from Music City Animal Rescue (MARS). His name was Wesson. He had green eyes that, strangely, reminded me of my own. From the beginning, Wesson didn’t feel like a pet. He felt like a presence—alert, observant, still in a way that suggested he was always listening to something we couldn’t hear. Well… like a cat, I suppose. 

Daughters Edith (left) and Jane (right) the day we adopted Wesson.

And then, within three months, he was gone. 

 No warning. No long illness. Just a sudden absence that didn’t make sense. We found him in his bed by the wood-burning fireplace in the kitchen. What we could piece together pointed to rat poison: likely residue left behind in the barn from years before. Something unseen. Something lingering. 

We buried him in the backyard. The house felt different after that. Quieter. But not in a peaceful way. 

Burying our cat outside the herb garden.

For a few days, I brooded over it. Over the feeling that something about it didn’t add up. Not logically. Not emotionally. The kind of rationalizing that follows grief. 

 And then a thought came to me that I couldn’t shake: What if he didn’t just find the poison… what if he was led to it? 

I know how bezerk that sounds, but that was the moment the idea of Bluebottles & Dustbunnies came to me.

Me at one of my writing spaces at Sweet Home.

• The mice were no longer just mice. 
• The flies were no longer just flies. 
• The house was no longer just a house. 

It became a system. A layered world operating just beneath perception. A quiet war where territory mattered. Where intelligence existed without language. Where introducing something innocent—like Wesson—into an old, established environment could be perceived as resistance, no matter how small or harmless he seemed. 

Though narrated by a cat, Bluebottles & Dustbunnies is a story about the systems we don’t see, the territories we assume are ours, and the quiet, often invisible forces that shape our lives without asking permission. But it took me thirteen years to realize that, from a storytelling perspective, it was Wesson who was the lens through which that world revealed itself. Because he was a cat, and, therefore, "closer to the ground" than I was. He was paying attention. 

The fields around Sweet Home

provide a never-ending supply of field mice.

We’ve had five cats since then. But what stayed with me about Wesson was the sense that a mysterious blend of Oligocene instinct, feline wisdom, and lethal capabilities was part of something much larger and ancient than human knowing. A precipice over a looming ravine up to which I stepped without realizing it. 

 And once you feel that, you can’t unfeel it so easily.

Robbie Grayson III is founder of Traitmarker Media, LLC, in Franklin, Tennessee, where he functions as Story Liaison, blending publisher, promoter, and publicist roles.