I consider myself a fairly self-sufficient person. But even I have to admit that there are times I need a man.
Today was one of those times.
Remember how I said I didn't open the electronic mouse trap I had set last fall, because I was too afraid to look inside? Well, today, after going to the hardware store to buy some more traps, I re-read the instructions on the electronic mouse trap box, and they said that disposing of any mice you caught was so easy. A child could do it! All right, the box didn't say that, but I was sufficiently shamed by how clean and easy it was all supposed to be that I came home, picked up the electronic mouse trap and looked inside.
There lay a dead mouse. Not the one from last night -- that one still appears to be on the loose -- but clearly the one from last fall, because it looked... sort of shriveled and flattened, and it smelled. Bad.
Being the girl that I am [insert self-mocking inflection here], I quickly shut the lid and practically flung the trap on the floor. Dead, rotting mouse. No, I did not react well.
Then, ashamed, I gathered several plastic bags together, put on some rubber gloves, and plunged back in. I took a deep breath, picked the trap back up, held it inside the plastic bags and as far away from my body as possible, opened the lid and turned it upside down.
Nothing.
Gave it a shake.
Nothing.
Gave it a harder shake.
Nothing.
The mouse was still inside. It was stuck. Perhaps to the peanut butter? Or its body was wedged under a section of the trap? Or maybe it had been dead so long that its body had started to... I don't know, disintegrate?
At that point, so terrified that the mouse would somehow spring back to life like in the horror movies* and run up my arm to bite my face off, I really did fling the trap to the ground, so hard that the batteries came out. Chagrined, I carefully put them back in, tried the upside-down shake one more time, then put the trap down and sat back, defeated.
*Note to self: Write a horror-movie screenplay about a dead mouse that comes back to life. Working title: "Zombie Mouse."
I do not like to admit this, but if I had had a man here, he would have laughed at me -- "Honey, you're such a pussy," he might have said (or, perhaps, something politer, if he's going to live in my house) -- and he would have taken the trap from me, somehow disposed of the mouse, handed me the trap back, and then made fun of me for weeks on end. He'd bring the story up at cocktail parties, and everyone would laugh heartily about how freaked out I was that a dead mouse would come back to life or give me rabies or otherwise infect me with the heebie jeebies.
Instead, I don't have a man here, so I am forced to say it myself: I am a pussy.
And what did I do, because I don't have a man? What do you think I did?
I threw the whole thing away. A $25 trap that's supposed to be able to catch 100 mice.
But it's going to make a great story at cocktail parties.
Update on the trap I built yesterday: No sign of the mouse, either in the trap or elsewhere. I am hoping that the peppermint-scented cotton balls are keeping it away, but I really have no idea. If there is no mouse in the trap as of tomorrow morning, I'm taking it down. I need my trash can back.
