To Kill a Mouse

While I wouldn't consider myself a morning person, I do enjoy getting up early and crossing off as many items on my to do list as possible before noon. This morning I had gone to the gym, showered, dressed, and organized my new coffee maker before entering my kitchen for breakfast. To my shock and horror I was confronted with a still living mouse, stuck to a glue trap, in the middle of my kitchen floor.

I looked at it. Was it real? Was this a prank? Had the ultimate frisbee players caught wind of the vibe of annoyance emanating from my apartment? No. It was real, a living mouse that had apparently drug itself into the middle of the floor from where the trap had originally been positioned.

I screamed. I called my dad. He was unavailable. I called my mom. "Honey, you've got to get a bucket and kill it. You've got to. Just do it." After watching it spin its little feet in vain, I considered my options and decided to find a frisbee player.

I found a college student in the middle of his breakfast and pleaded with him to help me remove a mouse from my kitchen. Gamely, he followed me back to my apartment. At that point I realized we had different ideas about mouse removal. I had asked a pacifist vegetarian to assist me in mousicide.

First, we tried to pull it off the glue trap. Using plastic cutlery we cut away at the glue trying to do what hours of his own efforts had failed at. At this point, I said, "Are you sure you don't just want to put it in the dumpster and let it die?" He looked at me like I had just suggested putting his grandmother in the dumpster. We continued in our mouse surgery. When it was obvious that even if freed, the critter would almost certainly die from severe leg injury, we talked about alternate types of mercy killings.

In the end, neither of us had the stomach to do the most humane act, that of swift and certain murder with some sort of heavy object. Instead we did end up putting it in the dumpster, hoping that the pain it would suffer would be short. I profusely thanked my co-mouse remover, and both of us gave up on breakfast. I can't get that poor little animal out of my mind. Glue traps are inhumane.