It was after 1 a.m., and I was struggling to fall asleep. “Go to sleep,” I told my sleepy body and rushing brain. I did my usual trick of inhaling for a count of 4 and exhaling for a count of 6, hoping to slow my thoughts down enough for them to fall off their tracks so I could rest. It was working. Almost. But then a meow, a very loud meow, the kind that says, “I have something I’m about to kill. Behold the might feline hunter!”
Usually, the meow is from tiny Miyako, and usually she has successfully maimed a hair tie, carrying forth its stretchy hot-pink corpse so we can share in her glory. This time, both she and Sidney Iowa Goldberg were doing that hunter-on-the-loose meow-yell, so I turned on the lights.
The kitties were in our bathroom, where they cornered a small mouse. The most adorable friggin’ mouse I ever saw: velvety gray with big ears and an agile (but not agile enough) body. It wasn’t a full-grown mouse, but it was bigger than a child mouse, so I’m guessing it was a tween. In any case, its days, or more accurately, minutes, were numbered.
“Ken, the cats have a mouse, and it’s so adorable. What do I do?” I called out.
“Get a shoe and kill it,” he answered.
Moi? Kill the most darling mouse in the world just because my cats were playing badminton with it? “I can’t kill it. It’s too adorable. What other options do we have?”
By this time, he was getting up, telling me there were no options unless I wanted this mouse to reproduce, and for its babies, grown one day into aging and ruthless hipsters, to chew up my favorite blouse and eat my best books. Someone had to kill it, and it had to be one of us.
Within minutes, Ken with a mop in hand (the kind with the sponge), both cats, and Shay the dog stood at the mouth of the bathroom. Ken turned to Shay first. “Shay, go get the mouse,” he said. Our 90-plus pound dog pressed his scared head into my thigh while stepping backwards. Miyako stretched out to watch the spectacle.
And so it went: Sidney doing his best to chase the mouse out of corners, then looked up at Ken and in cat ESP, communicated, “Get him, Dad! Kill him dead!” I tried to watch, but then I saw the mouse’s sweet velvet ears, and heard his terrified chirp-squeaks, so I went to sit on the bed with Shay, both of us trembling.
Ken, despite Sid just playing with (and not killing the mouse), got the cats out of the way and did the deed, and then he flung the results outside, telling me that I really needed to learn to kill mice too. It’s part of life in the country, keeping balance in the ecosystem of the house, and cuteness shouldn’t bias me so much.
It was after 3 a.m. when I finally got to sleep, irrationally sad that “too cute to die” doesn’t apply when it comes to a mouse in the house.
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