Of Mice and Me

The mouse fiasco has come to a gruesome end. Both sides suffered heavy casualites. In the end, one mouse and four muffins were sent to the great garbage can outside.

In case you didn't know about the mouse fiasco, there was one.

It started like a bad monster thriller, strange scrabbling noises in the walls late at night while I'm home alone. It's unpleasant to wake up to something moving in your room but not in your room, and sounding like a troop of dire rats.

Then, first contact. After a post-class nap, went out into the kitchen (by now evening; again, home alone). That pot just moved! Turned on the light just in time to see the back end of a mouse escaping under a stove burner.

"Ennnngh, shit!"

It's several minutes before I can work up the courage to clean the counters. The next day the landlord brings over four traps, sets them under the cabinets. Several hours later, I return to the kitchen...

"I'll be around today to get rid of it, but tomorrow I'm leaving for the weekend so you'll have to take care of it yourself," he had told me.
"Oh, I'm sure I can buck up and throw out a dead mouse," I had laughed.

How naieve of me!

There, poking out from under the counter, is one long stringy mouse tail.

My heart is pounding. I know it's dead, but as I lean down just to double-check, every part of me is wishing that I don't discover the rest of a dead mouse attached. I get as far as visual contact with the back legs and straighten up quickly.

The kitchen has become a place of fear. Mice crawling on the stove! Dead mice unpolitely sticking out from under the cabinets!

It's very clear that I certainly can not get rid of a dead mouse. The landlord says he won't be over until the morning.

I tread nervously down the very middle of the isle as I microwave my dinner. What am I afraid of? It's not like the thing's going to resurrect, grab my ankles, and pull me under into a terrible void of mousey hell-torture, right?

Right?


This morning, my fearless landlord picks up the trap and mouse bare-handed.

"Oh, yeah," he says, "On the nose. It got him right across the eyes."

"I'm pretty sure I don't want to see that," I say, and turn around.

He returns with the newly-emptied trap, re-peanut-butters it, and puts it back.
"If there's one mouse, there's usually another, right?" he says.

God. Emily can take that one.