A new and interesting twist on the same old murder.....
Like so many starlets at the academy awards who tearfully promise themselves they wouldn’t cry, I swore I wouldn’t write about killing mice again. I thought I had covered the whole genre, from trapping to poison to blunt object traumas to the head. I was certain that there was nothing left to say. And generally there wasn’t. Until of course last night.
I was sitting on my bed in a benedryl induced haze, waiting for the drugs to completely put me to sleep. I had been sick with some terrific stomach bug that had left me weak and tired, but as I had laid around for several hours already that day I was finding it tough to sleep despite being tired, so had taken the benedryl to knock me out. I was writing letters home which will inevitably arrive after the event I’m meaning to write about when I heard some soft tapping coming from near my door. I thought perhaps it was the little boy who lived on my compound coming to greet me. I had heard that he had come home earlier, and despite us not speaking any common language, we’ve become buddies.
I shouted a greeting at the door three times to no response. Finally I hauled myself off my bed and opened the door. What greeted me on the other side was not a smiling little boy but a mouse crawling up the inside of the netting I’d wrapped through my burglar door to prevent mosquitoes in the warmer seasons. I pushed open the door and he was dangling like Tom Cruise in one of the “Mission Impossible” films. I grabbed the dustpan from the floor and flicked him off the door into the night. Little did I know that would set the tone for the night…
Around eleven thirty I woke up in from a deep sleep in a big confusion. I heard splashing around in my bathtub. At first I thought perhaps the cork had come out of the piping I’ve been using to shower and the sound I was hearing was the water rushing out into the pipe into the bathtub. Upon closer inspection I saw a dark something in the corner of the tub. I had left a small amount of water in the bottom to rinse some of the laundry I had soaking in the morning as the water has been out. I didn’t remember leaving anything in the tub and as soon as I turned around to grab my headlamp the splashing began again and I had a strong suspicion as to the nature of the intruder.
When I shone the light in the tub it was indeed a mouse, attempting to climb out of my bathtub. A quick survey of the situation determined that he had probably come in through the slightly open window climbing in through a hole in the netting that surrounded the piping. Strangely enough this was not the first mouse I’d seen in a bathtub, the other one was in Maun at Anna’s house. She being a vegetarian and an animal lover that mouse was trapped and released. As I am not a vegetarian or an extreme animal lover, this mouse would not be experiencing the same fate.
I thought that the fact that I had not taken any drastic measures to disturb whichever animals were living in my ceiling making noise and waking me up all the time had been an appropriate enough attempt at hospitality. When I mentioned the intruders to my landlady she suggested that perhaps it was the mice that fly (bats) that had gotten up there and she would look for the hole which they were using to get in and block it. As there are holes all over I very much doubted the success that this mission would bring. She then asked if I had any poison to kill the mice in her house. I told her that I had something better and lent her one of my traps, secretly smug in my current lack of a mouse problem, due to what I considered good management techniques: read two traps and a shitload of poison.
KARMA. (sing-songy voice)
Once I got the headlamp out I was able to catch the little bastard between a shallow wash basin and a deep bowl, using his inability to properly swim to my advantage. I took my improvised trap out in the yard to make a plan. Every time I heard him scramble I yelped a little bit as well. I knew at that moment that bashing him wasn’t going to be an option, as last time that had ended badly. I had been nauseous and generally sick a majority of the week and wasn’t in the mood to lose what little might have remained in my stomach over yet another gory murder in my front yard.
Suddenly the bit of water in the bottom of the basin gave me an idea. Drowning! I’m not certain it was the recent studying I’ve been doing for the GRE about angles and geometry or if it was a drug induced hallucination of some sort. But I quickly decided drowning would be the most effective form of capital punishment. I grabbed a brick to place on top of the upturned bowl and ran for a bucket and the outside standpipe.
I opened the tap only to hear an unsatisfying hiss. No water. Well this would make drowning a more difficult option, but yet not impossible. There was also a bucket full of water in the bathroom, waiting for morning that I would usually use to wash my face. I was going to have to wander around with a dirty face in the morning but it seems knowing this mouse would be dead was worth it. I grabbed the water and went back to where my captive was held.
I carefully poured the water into the basin. Nothing. The water couldn’t get up in the bowl because of the air inside. I still cannot imagine what inspired me to attempt to defy the laws of physics or gravity or whatever scientific truth means that I had effectively created a little submarine bubble for this little bastard but that is exactly what happened. I tried a few times to tip the whole production to get the water up inside the bowl but my hands weren’t big enough to grasp the basin and hold down the bowl. The mouse would escape and swim around desperately, and I would squeal, and it was generally bad. So now I had a trapped mouse, a basin full of mouse shit water, and a brick on top. Prior experience told me crying wasn’t a helpful option in this scenario.
My benedryl addled mind could do no more. I was worried about leaving the whole production either too close to the house as he would inevitably try his little breaking and entering scheme again, or too far into the yard as I have a highly curious four year old little boy who is currently staying on the compound and had visions up him upending the thing and the mouse escaping in the morning. In my drug induced stupor of a brain the idiot mouse clearly had rabies as it was crazy enough to repeatedly try to enter my house (somewhere in my mind the exact diagnosis and suggested rehabilitative treatment was crawling it’s way out from the depths of my criminology and psychology degrees as I’m cross referencing my time at a law firm for the statues on capital punishment that I’d already sentenced this monster to.) and was going to attack the child before I got up and how would I live with that? It seems these bloody things are bent on making me lose sleep whether they’re dead or alive!
So I did something slightly crazy.
I went into my house and grabbed a pen and a post it.
I wrote on the note:
“Please kill the mouse”
And drew a sort of stick figure mouse drawing on it.
I have absolutely no idea whom I was appealing to, as the little boy likely cannot read Setswana much less English. I began to laugh hysterically and exhaustedly in my yard in the moonlight. Perhaps some Tokaloshi or an bilingual African spirit would take care of the job.
I woke the next day and looked at the whole set up in my yard and knew I couldn’t deal with that just then. When I came home from work the girl on my compound upended the whole mess and the mouse was indeed expired.
It just struck me that perhaps it was hypothermia. Eish.
No comments:
Post a Comment