Like a Dr. Seuss Tale, In a Way

So I think we're far enough removed from the events now that I can go ahead and tell this story without flailing around like a prepubescent girl. But we'll see.

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About a week and a half before Christmas, I became completely convinced that there was a mouse in my apartment. I had no direct evidence at first. Only the slow disintegration of the gingerbread house that I left on the dining room table from our Christmas party. As the house wasn't so much made of "gingerbread" as it was "cardboard reconstituted to resemble a hard cookie with gingerbread flavoring," I had assumed it would be fine to leave out and among the elements.

But as more chunks of it would fall off, I became more suspicious, as it seemed very solid and rock-like when we were doing the construction. The final straw came when one morning I found that one of the artificial gingerbread trees in front of the house had been partially gnawed away. As I figured it (pretty) unlikely that Frnak had snuck in during the night and chewed down a bit of tree, I took this as real confirmation that there was indeed a mouse in the house. As it were.

I went to the store to buy some sort of mouse trapping device, after discussing it with Frnak and deciding that it would probably be a bad idea to just kill it outright. That's mean, right? Also, what if it died in the walls? We would have mouse stink, and also possibly a mouse ghost haunting our condo.

Sadly, though, as I was staring at the "humane" mouse deterrent devices in the store, I realized I had no idea what I would do if they actually worked. Most of these things centered around glue. As in a mouse would wander over this trap and be stuck to the glue. As if this solved the problem.

What are these people thinking? One morning I'm going to wake up and find a live mouse glued to a trap. And then what? Do I need to kill it on my own? Drive it to a farm and release it into the wild, minus its feet, which are permanently immersed in the glue? Reason with it until it understands human language and convince it to leave? This is not the mouse from The Rats of NIHM, or that delightful Pixar cartoon.

No sir, the glue was right out. As there was no full-on cage type trap, I was left only with the lethal alternatives. As I had horrifying visions of trying to set up a traditional mouse trap (spring + cheese + SNAP) and losing most of a finger just getting it set, I opted for the old standard of poison. It wasn't the most elegant solution, and it might someday have led to smells and haunting, but I couldn't wrap my mind around dealing with a mouse on my own terms. Poison it was.

My hunting instinct fully honed, I set up these little dishes of poison around various areas of the house and kept the place immaculately clean all the time leading up to and through Christmas.

Immediately we realized that indeed we did have a mouse. Possibly a giant colony of mice, in fact, judging on the amount of poison that was consumed during the first week of trap setting. This box of poison boasted that there was enough materials available to finish off 6-8 mice, and we were burning through the whole thing at a rapid pace. At that point I had visions of the opening scene from Ratatouille, expecting any morning to wake up and find a damnable mouse convention passed out dead in the middle of our floor, or ready to lead a coup d'etat of the apartment.

Either way, I was very tense for about 9 consecutive days there.

(Here we switch to the present tense to do a sort of stream-of-conscious sort of reliving, as I can't objectively run this part down.)

Around day 10 of MouseWatch '07, I'm idly minding my own business and playing around on the computer after a long day at work. Suddenly I sense a bit of movement out of the corner of my eye, and I see this little (gigantic!) brown mouse just sort of wandering around my room, all nonchalant-like, or possibly just horribly disoriented, based on its swerving sort of gait.

I make some manner of noise that I can't do justice to in print, but suffice it to say that even in the mouse's drunken state it recognized the signal of "a 12 year-old girl has just spotted me, perhaps I should hide" and wandered underneath my bed.

Y'all? Let's just pause a second. There was a tiny (gigantic!) brown mouse, alive and presently hiding under my bed. Odds are, if you're reading this, you probably know me. Imagine how you would expect that I would react. And then quadruple it. I never thought I had a real aversion to mice (it's not like they're clowns or something), but sweet damn I suddenly found my real fear of rodents in that moment. And it was under my bed!

I run down the hall to Frnak's room and enlist him to help deal with this situation. We both approach my room in the same manner as you see on a television sitcom when someone suspects that there is a burglar in their house, all peering around corners and easily yelping at light provocation. After examination of the room to verify that the mouse has not changed locations, we begin to formulate plans.

First things first.

Jason: Frank, grab my shoes.
Frnak: [Grabs Jason's shoes. Takes one and hands it to Jason. Takes the other, holds it by the toe and wields it like a club.]
Jason: Not as a weapon! I need to put them on! God!
Frnak: Well how am I supposed to know! We need to be able to defend ourselves.
Jason: (breathlessly) Defend ourselves?! It's a tiny mouse! We are totally bigger than it. But seriously, if that mouse were to run over my bare foot, I would have a heart attack and die right there. Wait wait wait. Are you actually planning on killing it? Oh good lord, you are, aren't you? (*Gasp and point*) And you were going to use my shoe to do it! Those are my brand new favorite shoes and you were going to ruin them with mouse blood!
Frnak: (turns and gives Jason a look)
Jason: Yeah, okay, I'll calm down.

The plan is formulated: I cannot kill a mouse. Frnak is less than certain that he can. I decide then that we're going to capture him and release him into the wild, far far away from our house. Suitably armed for such a task (Frnak's Weapon of Choice: White Styrofoam Ice Chest, Jason's WoC: Black Mesh Wire Trash Can from the Bathroom) I sneak over to the bed and start raising up the...

(Sidebar: What the hell is that thing called? The thing that hangs down over the box spring to the floor? Bed curtain? Hanging... yeah I have no idea. But it's that thing.)

... the thing an inch at a time, tucking it under the mattress, all the while expecting the mouse to come shooting out from underneath, possibly going straight for my eyes. An imagination is a terrible, terrible thing to have and don't ever let anyone tell you differently. Finally the suspense is just too much for me and I decide to just move the bed altogether, indicating to Frnak that he should be ready to ice chest the little bastard the second we see him.

I move the bed to the left. No mouse. To the right. No mouse. Away from the wall. No mouse.

Frnak: If this mouse is a figment of your imagination, I swear to God I will beat you with this ice chest.
Jason: NO! It was totally there! I saw it.
Jason's Mind: Oh my God, what if I'm losing my mind? Imaginary mice? They commit people for that kind of thing.

Fueled by my visions of being sent to the nut house, I give the bed a mighty pull and move it entirely to the other side of the room.

Mouse!

Frnak: AHHHHHH!
Mouse: (runs and hides under my nightstand)
Jason: Dammit! What happened to the plan? You were supposed to catch it!
Frnak: I started to think you were making the whole thing up. I wasn't prepared!

So now we have a mouse under a tiny nightstand. Luckily, due to the fact that my apartment leaks heat faster than anything else in the world, I have already sealed off all of the exits to the room by stuffing clothing at the bottom of each door jamb. We know he cannot get out, it's only a matter of time.

That is until we move the nightstand and the mouse starts making his drunken way towards the closet. There is lots of shrieking and flailing, but little catching of the mouse. Somehow it worms its way through the blockade and into the closet.

There are several more minutes of shrieking, flailing, name-calling, and promises to burn every article of clothing the mouse touches, before finally the mouse is trapped under the wire mesh trashcan in the closet. Now we have a very angry mouse scaling the sides of its tiny prison, which is possibly more terrifying than when it was out on the loose. As Frnak leans down to take a closer look, the mouse turns and hisses at him, unnerving him practically to death. The mouse is a satan mouse. But we soldier on. Using our McGuyver-like instincts we upend the mouse, and seal him inside the trashcan with a piece of cardboard.

We make the very long trek from our apartment all the way to the expanse of woods that borders our apartment complex. I feel pretty confident that he's not going to be able to find his way back, seeing as there's a fence, a ditch, a huge lawn, a driveway, a dumpster, and three other apartment buildings he would have to traverse. Also, the little (gigantic!) guy is seriously lethargic, I'm not thinking he is long for this world anyways. I manage to finally shake him free of the trash can after several scary moments wherein I thought he would extract his revenge on me by forever clinging to the side of the can until the opportunity to feast on my flesh arose. He stumbles around drunkenly for a few seconds and then finally wanders into the woods, never to be seen or heard from again.

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I should probably follow that entire story up with the postscript that we were incredibly lucky that a) it was just one mouse, and b) when we found him he had eaten 5 full servings of poison, because seriously had we met that mouse at full strength, it would have bested both of us and would now rule the apartment like a king.

But we did win, and I am happy to report there has not been even a mention of any further mousings, at all. (I've been keeping a vigorous watch over the poison, just in case.) I like to think that it's an all around triumph, even if there was a lot of shrieking and childish name-calling in the process. It's all about the ends, not the means.