A Mouse in The House

By Don Weston

Recently my granddaughter, who along with sister, brother and mom, had been living with us for a while, saw a mouse in the house.

Alyssa, a precocious seven-year-old, noticed a small gray ball streak across the floor in her bedroom. Not sure what to make of it, she crossed the room and lifted her sweater up off the floor. The floor, for non-parents, is the equivalent of a closet for three-to twenty-five-year-olds.

“Eeeep!” Alyssa squealed.

“Squeak!” the mouse responded, now running directly at her.

I peeked my head into the doorway. “What are you yelling about?” I asked.

“And why are you standing on top of your bunk bed? Quit playing around.”

“I’m not playing!” She stomped her foot on the mattress with clenched fists and flopped onto her stomach. “I just like the view up here; it gives me a new perspective of my room.”

“Well get down. It’s time for lunch.”

“I’m not coming down! There’s a mouse down there, he tried to eat me.”

I chuckled and gave her my best cliché: “A little mouse won’t hurt you, he’s probably more afraid of you than . . . Er, where did you say this mouse was?” I asked, suddenly feeling a tingling sensation.

“He’s crawling up your leg, Papa.”

“Auugh!”

“Papa, you’re hurting me,” Alyssa cried.

“Sorry baby. How did your hand get under my shoe? By the way, the view up here does give a totally different perspective of your room. Your Barbie dolls look like ants.”

“Papa, I never saw anybody jump that high before.”

“You’d be surprised what you can do with a mouse crawling up inside your pant leg. I think I can fix the ceiling,” I said, brushing the plaster out of my hair.

“I think you scared him more than he scared you,” she said. His hair has a white streak in it just like yours.”

“That’s just plaster,” I said, hopefully.

“Papa, he’s coming up the ladder. Push the ladder off the bed! Push the ladder off the bed!”

“Good Idea, Alyssa.” With brute strength, I threw the bunkbed ladder across the bedroom. It whacked the wall with a loud thump. The mouse bounced off the wall too, and slowly poured down the ladder, eyes crossed, like a slinky rolling down each rung.

He got back on his feet and shook his tiny fist at me, hurling little mouse epithets in our direction. Then, he crawled under the dresser to recuperate.

Suddenly we were seeing mice everywhere, and they were brazen warriors, not meek, nor (excuse the pun) mousy.  I baited traps with peanut butter, cheese, even ground hamburger—nothing worked. Later, my other grand-daughter,  three year-old Brianna, fessed up she was feeding them on the sly.

I tried to push Bubba, our nine-year-old cat, into action. When Bubba  was younger, and dumber, he often would run around the house, scaling the walls, jumping on top and back down from the refrigerator, and generally howling with the hebee jebees until we thought we would go crazy.

“Flat Tail,” his nickname then, isn’t as feisty these days.  He doesn’t set records in the 100-yard kitty dash through the house, nor get underfoot any more even after I quit wearing those heavy boots. “Go get him, ‘Flat Tail,’” I pleaded. He just sneered at me and walked away.

Out of frustration, I went to the hardware store and purchased a pellet gun. We were alone in the house, just me and the mice. They gathered in the dining room to plot their strategy. Splitting up into groups of two they spread out around me in the front room.

“Ha!” I yelled maniacally, and pulled out the pellet gun from the back of my waistline. “Eat lead, you little rats!”

“Pow!” went the gun. “Zing!” went the pellet, as it bounced off a metal statuette on the television. “Crash!” went the window.

The mice were not unnerved. They started running toward me in pairs putting distance between themselves to make poorer targets. “Pow!” went the gun toward the floor as they ran toward me. “Pow! Pow! Pow!” in rapid succession.

A gray mouse with a white streak across his head, similar to mine, jumped off my foot just as I fired the last shot. “Ow!” I yelped, holding my foot while executing evasive hopping motions.

I fell to the floor shooting wildly. I didn’t tag any of the varmints, but I winged an armchair, put our television out of its misery, and drained the goldfish bowl, giving Bubba a bath.

The cat screeched, and ran around the room like a Tasmanian Devil. From my prone position, I uncorked a few more shots at the retreating mice as they scurried into various hiding places.       In the end, the fatality count was high. One big toe, two goldfish, a sopping cat, one window, two mirrors, and a TV all bit the dust.

A few days later, I was bored beyond belief, the television being broken and my wife having taken my pellet gun away.  “What are you doing, Papa?’ Alyssa asked when she returned from watching television at a friend’s house.

“Watching TV.”

“You can’t watch TV, it’s broken. You shot it, remember,” she frowned.

“The mice are putting on a production of Star Trek. It’s the one where space gods pluck Captain Kirk off the Enterprise and make him fight two barbarian aliens to the death on a barren planet to save his crew.”

“Papa, they’re not acting,” Alyssa said.

“Sure, see. That one just karate-chopped the scary alien in the neck. Uh, oh, look out Kirk, that other one has a big rock…”

“Papa you’re silly. They’re dying.”

“Well, it’s not Shakespeare in the Park,” I agreed.

“No, I mean mom poisoned them. She put poison in the cupboards.” Alyssa joined me and we watched them for awhile, unsure. “Captain Kirk needs to go on a diet,” she noted.

In the end, they did die, but not before giving an excellent revival of  “Three Blind Mice.”  “It’s a good thing they can’t read,” I said dropping them into the garbage can.

“Why?” asked Alyssa.

“If they had taken to reading murder mysteries, they never would have fallen for old the poison in the cupboard ploy.”