Little Mr. Mousikin, in our little housikin...

Let me preface this entry by saying that it's been a long, hard week of swabbing bodily fluids, and not in that fun way. I'm talking vomit and poop, friends, almost all of it emanating from a small miserable person. It's been our first real brush with pukey illness chez Quince, and I guess we should count ourselves lucky. Public service announcement directed at childless people reading this: I'm sure you've thought to yourselves, "oh, I'd like to have kids, but it must be a drag when they get sick and puke all over your shirt." Yes, it is a drag. SAVE YOURSELVES. It's too late for me. Wear a condom. I beg you. Because otherwise you will not only have a small person puking on your shirt, you will actually instinctively be stretching forth said shirt while still on your body to better catch the stream of barf before it hits the carpet.

Yes, that is a true story. And here's another one: we have mice. Many mice. We have had at least 9 mice living in our house. How do we know this? Because we have killed 8 of them using mousetraps.

And what happened to the ninth? Well may you ask.

We have a cat, Smudge, who is really quite lovely. She is also elderly and frail and, to be honest, a bit of a prima donna. She is the type of cat who complains over a full food dish, and we love her for it.

This week, Smudge has also had cause to complain that mousetraps were placed near her food dish, and the traps occasionally have contained dead mice. (Not for days on end; that would be gross, but just until we've gotten home for work or something.) She complains in Cat language, of course, but I can tell she's saying, "Waiter, there's a mouse near my soup."

Anyway, Smudge is far too refined to actually catch mice, or, apparently, even deter them from running riot. Or so I thought.

This afternoon, in order to tend to my poopy child, I came home early. I was attending to some important business while patiently awaiting the next poopsplosion (note to childless people: put Trojans on shopping list) and was taking an important phone call from the Editor-in-Chief. Who should come waltzing in but Madam Smudge herself, thoughtfully gumming the head of a mouse.

This was reasonably distracting in itself. Frankly, Smudge isn't the type of cat who'd wake us up if the house were on fire; if that were happening, it's more likely she'd start bitching about the fact her water dish was getting uncomfortably steamy. But the whole element of distraction began to get out of control when I noticed the mouse was still kicking its legs feebly.

Smudge gave me a look like "what now? I have sucked the fur bon-bon for several minutes, and am full of ennui."

I am still on the phone with the Editor-in-Chief.

Smudge puts down the fur bon-bon. It kicks to life and then starts to run towards me, obviously totally out of its little mind from breathing in the stank of Smudge's maw. Without thinking too much about it, I drop an empty yogourt pot down on top of the bewildered mouse.

I am still on the phone with the Editor-in-Chief.

The mouse begins to beat against the side of the plastic. Smudge gives a baleful wail at the loss of her fur lolly, a wail that sounds very much like "I was enjoying that."

I finally get off the phone with the Editor-in-Chief. What to do with the fucking mouse? I decide the drown the little bastard, because it seems like sensible plan and I might have read about doing something similar in a David Sedaris story. I ready a dustpan and brush, remove the pot, whisk the mouse into the dustpan then into the sink.

And yes, reader, I drowned him. I am a killer of mice. This was not manslaughter or criminal negligence, but actually first-degre mousiecicide.

A couple of things to know if you ever want to drown a mouse (perhaps having Googled "mousiecide" and wound up on this page): they appear surprisingly hard to drown. This one managed to swim around successfully for around a minute, like a very small Ophelia in the all-mouse production of Hamlet. They also poop quite a lot in their final minutes, which was unexpected and not at all fair, given how much poop I've had to deal with today already.

I might have left Ophelia for a few minutes to see what would happen, but the Editor-in-Chief called me again so I took a butter knife and weighed the mouse down under the water. Finally, after a conversation about performance management that went on far too long, Ophelia achieved her quietus.

She was put to rest in a Sun Valley plastic bag in the trash.

Note to self: scrub sink, autoclave butter knife.