October 3, 2004 — Exacerbation

I was sitting with Mimi in the living room when her roommate came downstairs and said there was a dead mouse in her closet. She said it was on a glue trap, the last one from the winter before when there had been a lot of mice in our house. This was the first they’d seen in awhile. I’d heard and found signs of mice downstairs, but they hadn’t been in my food and I hadn’t seen them, so I didn’t bother telling anyone aside from Mimi. Anyway, the body of a mouse in someone’s closet is more evidence than I ever had; it was a good way to be sure.

I said I would take the mouse out of her room. I hate glue traps, and I hated the idea of just throwing away the corpse of a mouse that had died struggling to free itself. I didn’t know what I would do instead, but I figured I could at least apologize to the dead mouse as I took it outside.

I went upstairs to get the mouse. It was still alive. I winced and carried it downstairs before hurrying to the basement to use my computer. I learned that vegetable oil neutralizes glue traps, so I brought a bottle of vegetable oil back upstairs with me.

I took the mouse outside and poured oil on its hind legs because only the back half of its body was on the trap. I kept pouring more oil onto it, working in the light of the motion-activated spotlight in the backyard. The light kept turning itself off because I wasn’t moving enough. Each time it did I would curse before standing up to wave at the spotlight, pretending and hoping the mouse might escape before the light turned back on. When I found it in the upstairs closet, the trap was already covered in shit and piss. The mouse was probably even more horrified now, with me hovering above it and pouring vegetable oil onto its hind legs.

I told myself it would just be another minute or two before I’d succeeded in freeing the mouse, at which point it would scurry away terrified but alive. After pouring enough vegetable oil to detach it from the trap, I nudged it off. It tried to run, but it had torn its left hind leg almost entirely off before I’d taken it downstairs.

It crawled in circles on the cement in our backyard. Stuck on its side, it seemed to be staring up at me. I didn’t know what to do.

I tried calling my parents, but they were in PEI. I think my dad would probably have told me to kill it so it wouldn’t suffer through the night, but I still needed him to tell me; I didn’t have very much nerve on my own.

I thought the mouse might be tired enough to want to die. I filled a container with water and put him in it. For a moment I tried to hold him down, but he struggled so much that I couldn’t do it. I poured the water back out.

My half measures had surely prolonged and made worse the cruelty that started with the glue trap. The mouse had almost succeeded in tearing its own leg off before I’d started torturing it with good intentions, and now it lay terrified in the cold, soaking wet and covered in vegetable oil.

I thought of how easily and quickly I could kill it, but it kept staring at me and I couldn’t do it. I carried it to a dark corner, off the cement and on grass. I set it down and pretended there was a chance it could survive the night, that after resting it might yet be able to survive.

The next morning I found it dead in the same corner. I buried it in the backyard. I wanted to say something that would make it better, to apologize for leaving it to die alone in the cold, but it was recess in the schoolyard next door and several children were seeing who could scream the loudest. I couldn’t think of anything to say. I went to work.