mouse is a dish that’s best eaten live

Bonkers wanted up in my lap. I was blogging. I said no.

He sat and pouted for a while until he fell asleep sitting up. When he jerked himself awake, he sauntered off toward the dining room, probably to slop water from his bowl all over the floor. He’s getting good at that.

Several minutes passed in near-silence as I tapped at the keys of my laptop. Then, from the dining room came the sounds of a cat getting into trouble. He might have been on the table, trying to get the lid off the butter dish, or he might have been scrounging through the basket of empty bottles, trying to get at a rinsed-out tin of cat food that still whiffed faintly of whatever that nasty brown stuff is they make cat food out of. Either way, he was clearly up to no good.

I jumped out of my seat and made it to the dining room in three giant steps. Bonkers was hiding under the table when I got there. As I stepped to one side to get a look at him, he ran to the other side of the table. He was definitely hiding something he shouldn’t have had, but if I moved, he shifted to a spot under a chair or the far corner of the table where I couldn’t see him. I started pulling the chairs out from under the table and finally he ran into the living room with me in hot pursuit.

That’s when I saw the mouse’s tail. He very definitely had a mouse’s tail dangling from his muzzle. I ran back to the kitchen to grab a mason jar that was sitting on the counter and came back to the living room with it. Sooner or later he’d drop the mouse, and I needed something to trap the little monster. If I didn’t, the damn thing would disappear into the woodwork.

No such luck. For the mouse, that is. When Bonk dropped it and I took a step forward with the overturned mason jar in hand, he deftly snatched it up again and took a step or two away from me. “C’mon, drop it,” I urged him. He turned his head away, ignoring me. He began to gnash on it.

“Aggh! Mouse getting eaten! Mouse getting eaten!”

I’d been shouting mostly out of shock to nobody in particular, but the alarm brought My Darling B out of the spare room where she was watching cat videos on the internet to witness the carnage. She clapped her hands over her mouth to stifle a scream when she saw Bonkers choking the thing down.

Two bites, three, maybe four more and it was gone. He swallowed the damn thing whole, licked his chops, then paraded around the room meowing loudly. “That’s right! I’m the cat! I’m the big, bad mouse-catcher! Suck it, mousies! I’m gonna getcha!” And so on.

Mouse is a dish that’s best eaten live.