The Mouse
I’ve never had mice because I’ve always had cats.
There are all those studies that explain even the laziest house cat is an ecological disaster, eating up birds and rodents and anything they can catch if you let them out of the house. In my house, I’ve seen my cats eat flies and roaches, spiders and skeeter hawks, even (on one notable occasion) an alligator lizard that took a wrong turn over the sliding glass door track.
Living in Brooklyn has accustomed me to the idea that even my rich friends have rodents. I’d rather this than fleas; both feel shameful but one of them is beatable. I’ve been beaten by fleas before. Their circus took my down-filled vintage sofa with them.
The mice appeared four months into my lease, scurrying along the warmth of the baseboard heaters and gnawing unseen during the quiet evening hours.
I discussed traps with my partner. Neither of us is afraid of mice, neither of us minds disposing of dead ones. I can’t stand glue traps. As much as I want to control the problem before it reaches my pantry, I simply cannot live with anything dying of thirst in my apartment. It feels barbaric. I put myself in the mouse’s position: if I gotta die, kill me quick.
So I bought well-reviewed snap traps, guaranteed humane, and carefully pinched down their springs. I loaded them with peanuts and I waited for the miniature axe to fall.
In the morning, the peanuts were all gone. One of the traps went off in my hand when I picked it up, but no mouse activity had tripped a single one.
Since I had previously been protected by feline fending, I didn’t know that it’s better to use peanut butter than something a skillful little mus musculus can grab with its dextrous forepaws. I reset the traps with a quarter teaspoon of Jif each.
I figured one might go off in the night, might even wake us. I laid my bait an hour before I was scheduled to leave for a dinner engagement. It did not occur to me that the mice moved boldly about the perimeter of my living room while I was in it. They wouldn’t dare! I had never seen one; only heard them or seen what they left behind.
About twenty minutes after setting the traps, I had forgotten about them completely. I was deeply engaged in the business of writing, focused and immersed at my laptop, enjoying the hours after the end of my day job and before my partner comes home from his. The sound of the trap closing on the mouse was utterly brutal; a brisk SNAP muffled by a little body covered in fur. I came up out of my chair so fast that I knocked it over.
Naturally, death did not come as swiftly as advertised. In a horror-movie montage, I saw the mouse twisting frantically to get free, flipping the trap against the hardwood floor. There was a terrible clatter, like green plastic army men had been given miniature artillery to fire directly into my nervous system. The mouse shrieked in its own register, a pitch so high that I could barely parse it above my own breath.
I approached—but what could I do? I couldn’t stop this, couldn’t take back the surrogate jaws I had hired to be the predator I could not employ or become. I couldn’t hasten this animal’s death with anything more humane than time. I got close enough to see that the trap had closed, not on the small neck of which it might have made quick work, but on the shoulder that was strong enough to resist for a few seconds. As I watched, the mouse gave one final heave, flipping the hardware once more in a gymnastic feat of strength powered by the will to survive.
Dario Argento clocked in for a half second from hell and tiny beads of blood spattered up the baseboard heater cover, up the wall. I stood there with my mouth open, knowing blood is the realest thing of all, and still not believing my eyes when they reported red on white.
The mouse stopped breathing. I know because I couldn’t look away. I watched its lungs work and work… and stop. And I felt every emotion available to me: pity, disgust, remorse, even a little love for an animal I had fooled with the promise of free peanut butter only to bring on a gruesome, incomprehensible death.
If I were a cat, I’d have eaten it. Or at least played with it a while. This seemed a waste and a terror, and I hated myself for doing it.
I got myself together. I picked up the trap with the mouse in it using the broom and the dustpan. I walked the mess out into my building’s lobby and dumped the corpse into the chute. I said a little prayer for the fallen fellow.
Inside, I cleaned up the blood with bleach and paper towels, making sure it didn’t dry there and become a brown stain for my conscience to torture me with when she’s drunk on hormones. I felt punchy and paranoid.
And then it was time to leave. I grabbed my coat and caught the train. My friend stood up from the table to greet me as I arrived.
“Did you know,” she said, concern in her eyes, “that you have a tiny little spray of blood all the way up your left cheek?”
In the ladies room, I cleaned my whiskers of my kill.