Mice Are Not Your Friends!

A friend of mine just informed me that he has pet mice. PET MICE. That's like getting pet head lice or pet spiders. Pests do not equal pets!

Perhaps I react so vehemently because my office has developed a mouse problem. I'm talking PROBLEM. I find mouse poos on my desk and lining the floor of my cupboard. They ate all my cheerios. They peed in my bowl. PEED IN MY BOWL. I hate mice.

In fact, one time, I singlehandedly killed one that had terrorized my neighbor in a story we call: The Time I Killed the Mouse

I arrived at Carrie's apartment just as the book club meeting was scheduled to start, and she buzzed me up. I walked up to her door, and it opened, but instead of ushering me in, she was coming out, adjusting her coat.

There was a mouse. And she needed traps. Stat. She'd be back.

Okay. Mouse. No problem, I thought, entering her apartment to find a handful of fellow bookclubbers ready to discuss whatever it was we had read most of.

Now, Carrie had a mouse problem, and I had a cat, but my cat was of a highly unreliable sort. I once watched him not catch a bug for about 10 minutes. It was depressing. After a bit of discussion and pesto pasta salad eating, Carrie returned, armed with sticky traps - large white pieces of paper with industrial-strength adhesive, sticky enough to trap even the wiley-est of mouses. They were promptly scattered around the apartment in strategic locations.

Time passes, and there's a general air of unease in the room of ladies attempting to discuss books while a roadent is on the move. The building had sent some dudes to plug up the holes in the walls with the unfortunate effect of trapping the wee beasties inside.

Jump ahead.

Liz strolls out of the bedroom, coming back from using the loo, and she announces that the mouse is on the bed. Alert. Alert. The Mouse Is On The Bed.

Chaos ensues.

I take matters into my own hands.

A broom! Stat! (It was a day full of urgencies.)

The mouse had run into the closet, and there it would meet its fate, I had decided. I created a barrier of stickytraps along the edge of the door, and proceeded to corner the bugger with the broom, forcing him to retreat across the stickytrap barrier. A barrier he would never cross.

Mouse trapped! Shit! Mouse trapped! But still wiggling a whole lot. In a stroke of what seemed like genius at the time, I took another trap and slap! Sandwiched it between the two. He was a goner. I picked it up. But wait, what the heck was I going to do with it now?

"Could someone please get me a bag?"

"Huh?"

"A bag. A bag. Could someone please get up and get me a bag?" I held the stickytrapped mouse out in front of me like a smelly diaper.

"Oh!"

A CVS bag was procured. I dropped the trap into the bag.

We couldn't just leave it in the trash to writhe and starve, it was decided, so Carrie, Liz and I took it outside. Leaving it in the can would be torture. We didn't have a bucket to drown it. So, the only logical step was to throw it against the ground as hard as possible and break its neck. So I did. Twice to be sure.

In retrospect, it might sound like a horrifying thing to do, but it really did end the poor sandwiched animal's suffering, and it kept Carrie from sleeping in the hallway. Which probably had even more mice. But I wasn't going to bring that up.

Comments

Unknown said…
Come to my house! I have 3 and you won't need to take the time to trap them. You can go straight to your favorite part...THE KILL.

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