Escape Story

I finished Bread Loaf two weeks ago and have been back in Essex for one.  Strange to go from being fully occupied to having all the time in the world.  For the past week I have been working at finding work and taking time to read anything that I could not during the summer.  Sometimes reading is an escape from dealing with the messiness of life.

A perfect example of this involves me, a mouse, and a semi-effective mousetrap.  The background to this story is: my house has a mouse, or rather several mice.  We had some last winter and thought they were gone but not so.  I cooked a large dinner last week and put off doing the dishes ‘til the morning only to find the plates cleaned off and the counter covered with tiny droppings.  Tim set the traps and we were in extermination mode. 

The inhabiting mice are smart(er than we thought) and quickly figured out how to snag the bit of ground sausage and peanut butter without tripping the spring.  Ingenuity on their part led to Tim’s greater ingenuity—BACON.  So the trap was set again, this time with a piece of fatty bacon hooked to the platform, and presto, the very next night the trap was sprung killing a tiny field mouse.  Tim disposed of our intruder in the woods and reset the trap.  I was sure that was the end of our mouse trapping.

Not so…the next morning, shortly after Tim left for the farm at 3:45 am, I went into the kitchen to get a bowl of homemade pasta (the pasta hell that I went through the day before merits its own story) and made a conscious decision to not look in the direction of the trap and ruin my snack.  I ate, read, and went back to sleep. 

Waking up, I returned the bowl to the kitchen and was starting to run the dishwater when I stopped to look over at the trap.  It was sprung, but no mouse.  I looked closer and saw a small trail of blood leading to the corner where a tiny mouse with a black tail the length of it’s entire body was hunched.  I looked closer.  It quivered a little and then seemed to move. 

It took no more than that to send me running out of the kitchen and to keep me out for the rest of the day.  When Tim got home I was in the bedroom, escaping the messy kitchen scene, reading.  He said, “There’s a mouse in the kitchen.  Did it just fall out of the bag I brought home?”

“Where is it?” I asked.

“On the floor by the door.”

“Oh,” I said.  “Look near the trap.  Is there a mouse cowering in the corner?”

“No.”

This Hercules of a mouse had managed to deliver it’s crushed frontal lobe (with a smashed nose and eyes) from the death grip of the trap and then pull it’s bleeding body from the counter across the kitchen to the door.  He was not lively, but certainly not dead.
I sat up high on my pillow with my feet tucked under me and asked Tim not to bring the mouse near the bedroom.  He took it outside and left it near the woods where it could die, or, maybe through some valiant effort, live and become a legend in the mouse world.  For my part, I promised to do the dishes the next morning.  I meant it too.  But I heard the mouse trap snap and now it seems easier to stay in bed writing this silly story.