A few years ago, Katie and I went to the Topsfield Fair with our friend Nick (an event that my mother would call, “a slice of life,” a description she reserves for things like bowling leagues and other congregations of people that are rather–how do I put this without sounding derisive?–enthusiastic about specific, odd things. For the people of the Topsfield Fair (and for the duration of our time spent roaming the different pens), this specific thing happened to be: farm animals. There’s much more to be said about out time at the Topsfield Fair, but it isn’t the focus of this story–it’s actually just the lead-in for the opening scene–and so I’m going to set down this string and polish off this parenthetical tangent and maybe finish this run-on sentence).
A day later, when we returned home, our oven was literally screaming. Like, actually. It was screaming. We warily approached it (and here I must admit that Katie and I–two city people–were already on edge from a weekend of spending so much time around things like pigs and hay and crocs) and we opened it, and Sylvia Plath’s ghost burst out!
That’s not true. Sylvia Plath’s ghost is actually very reasonable and a bit demure.
So the oven’s screaming. Katie and I are openly brainstorming what’s happening and through an intense process of deduction, and by actually looking behind the oven, we conclude that there is a mouse stuck on a sticky-trap we’d placed there days earlier after our mouse problem turned from ‘charming nuisance’ to ‘ruthless infestation.’
We extract the trap and the mouse. And by this I mean: I prod the screaming mouse and the trap with the bristles of a broom while Katie shrieks in the background. Then we sit there and fret for minutes and minutes, because what were we supposed to do next? How come we didn’t bring home any drifters from the Topsfield Fair? They’d surely know what to do. But we didn’t have any agriculturally-enable drifters, and so we turn to Our Lady and Savior, Saint Google.
Frantically (and by now I am also screaming) we punch in our query: “How To Kill a Mouse Nicely”
The results are just…beyond the beyond. “Don’t use sticky traps. The mouse will die of dehydration of starvation or panic. It’s a horrible way to go!” Katie and I scroll and scroll, horrified with ourselves. To me, all the postings are said in the bright tones of housewives straining not to let their roiling anxiety crack through their chiseled smiles.
“Grab the tail,” one poster says, “and just THWACK the mouse against the corner of a table. Aim for the joint between the spine and the head!” Another amended this with: “Or use a door. Works like a charm!”
“Or,” writes another, “You could freeze it. I hear that dying by cold is just like falling asleep. Lovely!”
By now Katie and I are clutching our faces like Edvard Munch’s ‘The Scream.’ I’m sure the mouse would have joined too if it’s hands weren’t adhered to a deathtrap.
We decide that we only have one choice: throw the mouse off our three-story-high fire escape into the back ally, which we had affectionately dubbed Playland when we moved into this apartment because, and I can’t imagine this is surprising to anyone who lives in Roxbury, that back ally was anything but playful.
The visual: it is nighttime, Katie and I rush out onto the fire escape. Our hair looks terrible, but not in a bad way. In a Kate Moss way, just unkempt. The mouse seems comforted in the eleventh-hour of it’s life but–yes–is still screaming. I’m the one holding the trap, like a tray, and on Katie’s count I draw back my hand and pitch the trap into the empty space behind our building.
I’m not sure what I expected, but it certainly wasn’t for the trap to serve as a makeshift hang glider, pitching this way and that way before daintily settling face-down among the broken glass far below.
Katie elects me to descend the rickety iron fire escape and, with a heavy heart, I realize the mouse is still screaming. I retrieve it and even though we are both fairly certain that “Death by lightly floating” was not on the list of ways to “Kill a mouse nicely,” we do try it again. This time I try to throw the trap upward, hopeful that the extra distance to the earth will mean a swift death. Or at least some sort of death. But the exact same thing happens. The mouse drifts to the ground, unharmed and terrified. I half expected the clouds to part and for a comically large God-hand to thrust a finger at us, turning us both into mice for the way we were wronging this poor rodent.
Katie and I are panicked and at a complete loss, unsure of who has it worse–us or the mouse? There is no way we’re putting a mouse in our freezer, and who can say for certain that thwacking it against a table will properly sever its spinal column?
I am again elected to go into Playland while Katie screams from beyond, shouting instructions from the fire escape. I am enveloped in guilt and sympathy and desperation. I can feel my admission letter to heaven vaporizing.
“Kill it! It deserves death!” Katie shouts. I look around for something–anything–and a moment later I am holding a large cinder block.
And at his point my memory gets a little fuzzy. In my remaking of this scene, Katie’s eyes turn red and her voice drops an octave as she booms, “FINISH HIM.” In my remaking, I am Cersei Lannister, but with combat boots and less of a drinking problem. The mouse is a rapist. A known rapist. All the neighbors look on, silently appreciative of this noble execution I am exacting. They can sleep at night knowing the sanctity of their family is safe, all because of me. All because of me and my stalwart resolve to rid the world of this one mouse, mercifully.
And I crushed the mouse with the cinder block. I actually did that. And you know what? It wasn’t even the last time I did that. We had many mice find their way onto sticky traps our landlord habitually placed in that apartment. And we crushed them all. I crushed them all. Except for one, which I set free using vegetable oil.
So the moral of the story is: mice deserve better than being cast from fire escapes on makeshift hang gliders (twice). They deserve swift and exacting deaths. And, because of my hardened soul, the pantries of Roxbury are a safer place. Except for that one mouse covered in vegetable oil. That’s my fault. And, also, if you ever attend an agricultural fair, perhaps consider bringing home a drifter or someone who knows about these things, because the Mommy Blogs of Google are surprisingly inhumane in their assessment of the word ‘Nicely.’