a most surreal experience, let me tell you.

No! It’s too much!

Unfortunately, my story does not have a happy ending. After two nights of live capture failure, Anna was off work and home alone yesterday; and the mouse – bobbing and weaving, appearing and disappearing, crapping on Anna’s books – began to unnerve her. She went out and bought traditional neck-snapping mouse traps, plus poison pellets. I vetoed the poison on the grounds that dead mice in the walls decomposing would not be an improvement to our situation. But I didn’t feel entitled to stay her murine executions. I couldn’t ask her to live in – how does she put it? – a ‘flooded, rat-infested shithole’. (We’ve had one or two flooding issues.) Anyway, I’m vegan, and she rides to hounds, and there was at that moment a fair bit of a dead cow in our refrigerator, so I suppose the mouse would get what was coming to him. He had invaded our home, I feebly justified to myself. And I had given him every opportunity of transportation to a nice churchyard.

Oh, I missed a bit: We sat on the couch last night watching Marcus dart around the mouth of the live trap. He even went in! But not far enough. He almost couldn’t resist the irresistable chocolate crunchy I’d donated to the cause, but he’s a cagey bugger. Also the death traps had gone down, as well, so the stakes were immeasurably raised. It was tense, dramatic. We agreed it was better than television. I was still hoping against hope for a live capture. It was in fate’s hands now.

Overnight we lay awake listening to the scrabbling. At one point I had to go down there and poke amongst the books and cables with my trusty Masai war club. “Keep it down, you bastard! Don’t you sleep?!”

Later, in the night, I figured I might have dreamed it, and Anna didn’t wake up at all . . . but I apprehended a snap – and a scream. A tiny scream. When I got up in the morning, I told Anna she probably had a dead mouse to deal with. (That was the deal – she did the killing, she could dispose of the body.) I got in the shower while she made noises that made me think I was very wise to be in the shower, rather than dealing with Marcus’ disposal.

Then Anna came into the bathroom and asked me what I was not able to take as a rhetorical question: “Do you want to hear something horrifyingly disconcerting?” “No,” replied I immediately and happily, soaping up. She told me anyway: “There are *two* dead mice in traps.” I let that sit for a moment. “I suppose it’s too late to name the other one.”

I did anyway. I call her Muriel. My theory is that when she heard Marcus scream, she ran to his lifeless body – then threw herself on the other trap.

We’re cleaning out behind the dresser, checking for progeny.

P.S. I’ve hacked your commenting system.