Blood on my hands

It's almost becoming like a joke – every day I wonder if this string of bizarre and/or unsettling events is finally over, and every day, it turns out that it is not.

Today I didn't have long to wait. I woke up groggy and discombobulated, went to the kitchen for a drink of water, and as I was drinking it walked over to check the mouse trap I set between the refrigerator and the wall last night. There, upside down under a snapped trap and spreadeagle in a pool of gore, was a little feller who looked an awful lot like this one here, only with the top of his skull sprung open and, you know, dead.

Every year at this time I go through a few weeks of trapping and killing the latest round of fresh new mice. I already wrote about the flaxseed-bear-eating mouse. Since then there's also been the one that ran across the kitchen floor four times in ten minutes while I sat at the table reading, and the one who over the course of an evening made off (one at a time, no doubt) with almost half a bag of beans, and the one that was hiding motionless behind a loaf of bread while I (unaware) made a sandwich, until he just couldn't stand it anymore and made a break for it – zipping across the counter and diving into the space under a burner on the stove ...

In other words, they're out of control! So far, in the last four days, I've killed three of them. I hate to do it – they're so cute, and I really do believe they have a right to live – ahimsa &c. – but there are just SO many of them, and they're so destructive and pestilence-ridden ... And yeah, it's just stuff – what does it really matter, in the cosmic scheme of things, if they chew into a brand new unopened box of cereal, or eat the rickrack off the clothespin bag my great grandmother made in the 50s.

But they also have a taste for the wires in the wall, which has caused me not just a little worry of late, especially last night, when our power went out for a few minutes, and then came back on, flickering, and I looked (on a hunch) into the space behind the kitchen cabinets where they were chewing wires last year and found that they have been at it again. Reverence for life is a value I care about, and I include my own life on the list of lives worth revering! I don't want to die in a raging inferno.

The so-called "humane" catch-and-release traps don't really solve the problem, by the way. The mice just turn around and walk right back into the house. Or if not, other mice do.

So anyway. I dropped the unhappy little corpse into the garbage, unrolled two whole squares of paper towel – the thick, expensive kind – wadded them up (to provide the maximum buffer possible between my hand and the carnage), and started mopping. And maybe this is just too much information, but the blood – for such a small animal, this one sure seemed to have produced a lot of it. The more I mopped, the more it all just seemed to spread itself around ... a gruesome and grisly start to what I hope will yet turn out to be a lovely spring day.