I crept slowly through the living room this morning with my phone held low in one hand, scanning the floor with the light from its screen, looking for the carcass of the mouse that I heard Scooter murdering in the early hours before my alarm went off. Didn’t see it, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t somewhere outside the little glowy patch of light from my phone, and on top of that my eyes are pretty bleary at five in the morning. I made a mental note to look again when all the lights were on, and get My Darling B to help.
As I got ready for my shower, I noticed mouse poop all over the bottom of the tub. Made sense. For whatever reason, Scooter likes to crawl into the tub to play with his toys, so if he caught a mouse it wouldn’t be unexpected at all for him to take it to his playground to bat it around a while. I rinsed the poop out of the tub, then climbed in and turned to close the shower curtain. I was more than a little surprised to discover I was being watched.
Two beady little black eyes were peering out at me from the upper folds of the curtain. I only had to shift a little to the left or right to catch sight of the little brown blob of fur behind the eyes. Little bugger must’ve run up the curtain to escape from Scooter. If Scooter didn’t run up after it, that only meant Scooter didn’t twig to the idea that the mouse went up. If he had, that shower curtain would’ve been hanging there in shreds, or he would’ve pulled it down to the floor.
The mouse made no move to get away, thank goodness. I wasn’t moving very fast yet, and neither was my brain. I thought at first that I might catch it in a plastic bag, but five seconds later I thought that was as stupid an idea as any I’ve ever come up with and forgot about it. Then I thought maybe I could hit it with a blunt object, figuring I had a reasonably good chance of hitting it, and if I didn’t kill it outright, I would probably stun it and get at least one more shot at it. Trouble with this idea was, I couldn’t find a blunt object in the bathroom suitable for clubbing a mouse to death.
While I was searching the hall closet, my eyes feel on the vacuum cleaner. I’ve sucked up some pretty big objects with that vacuum cleaner. In point of fact, I’ve accidently sucked up lots of the stuffed toy mice that B buys from the pet store. There must be a half-dozen of those under the cedar chest. If the vacuum can suck one of those up, surely it can suck up a real mouse, which is probably a lot more flexible than a stuffed mouse made of felt.
Only one way to find out.
The mouse still made no move to get away as I plugged the vacuum cleaner in, rolled it over to the end of the bathroom where the shower curtain was, and posed with the hose in my hand, like a sprinter in the blocks getting ready to jump. Totally wasted effort. When I switched on the vacuum and jabbed at the mouse with the end of the hose I aimed a little low and ended up sucking a whole bunch of shower curtain into the hose instead of the mouse, which just sat there, patiently waiting for me to go away, as I pulled the curtain out of the hose. When I switched the vacuum back on, I brought the hose down from above this time and found the bullseye on the first pass. *schlup!* went the mouse, disappearing from view so suddenly it was like watching a visual effect from a 1970 TV show.
I hesitated a moment before plucking the bag out of the vacuum, because the last thing I wanted was to be chasing a dusty mouse all over the house at five o’clock in the morning. The experience of being suddenly ingested by a household appliance must’ve stunned it into a coma, though, because it didn’t move at all as I yanked out the bag and sealed up the hole with packing tape. Then all I had to do was make a quick trip out to the garbage can in my underwear, and I was done cleaning up that mess.
This Is Drivel 