I sleep on a leather futon in the basement office when I have a cold or drink too much; I snore horrifically. In this instance, it was the cold. The drinking too much; it rarely happens.
The south office wall borders the pantry. If I walk into the basement and turn right, I will be heading straight for it.
There's a good reason I'm disturbed.
This might demystify the previous post, but the nasty mouse that bit me was actually trapped on a glue board on the floor of the pantry. After the first attempt at a merciful kill, I did what any human being would do...I whacked it on the skull with a hammer. Yes, it's brutal, but you can't release a mouse back into the fields after it's been trapped on a glue pad. Ask 3M, the glue is hyper industrial strength. But after the single, swift and merciful blow--and for a reason I can't understand--I left the corpse there on the floor.
Subconsciously, perhaps a warning to the other mice, evidence of my blood thirst and the consequences of living in my house. My version of severed heads on pikes, perhaps?
The pantry door has been propped open for two weeks to give our cat access to her natural pray. And she did catch one, which she left dead at the bottom of the 1st floor stairs, which I stepped on, which was lucky. Lucky. Because, if my wife had stepped on it, she would be catatonic in an ICU. She's utterly horrified by mice. If I even talk about mice, she gets queasy. If I told her what I did to the mice I capture with glue, she would become physically ill.
Thus far, the rodent body count is four. One by guillotine trap, one by feline, and including the last causality, 2 by industrial death glue.
And I left the pantry door open. On the floor, a dead mouse, half it's corpse stuck to a glue board, with 100 per cent cat access.
I woke up in a panic. It was 3:18. Everything quiet, except the blood flow pounding in my ears. Shit, I don't want to go out the door. I don't want to know what might have happened in the pantry.
I leave the office and walk slowly around the corner, approaching the pantry door, close enough to see inside. Peeping slowly. Very slowly, until...
OH...JESUS WEPT! The glue trap is gone, dead mouse and all. I stumble back, more horrified than being bitten by a mouse--which really did happen. I have a vision that makes my skin turn cold--more terrifying than the turd tornado-suffocation vision.
This vision is of my wife, wakened suddenly by the familiar thump of the cat hopping onto the mattress. She turns, barely awake and reaches out for the familiar, soft fur as the cat nuzzles closer. But her fingers grasp a stiff edge. In the darkness, she feels along this edge until she puts her fingers in something sticky. She pulls back, but the cat recoils. She can't get her fingers free.
In this state of semi-consciousness, reason can seem remote, things are confusing and surreal.
With her free hand, she turns on the lamp and screams at what she sees. Her had is stuck to a glue board, which is stuck to the cat's fur, with the body of dead mouse hanging off of that.
No. NO! I check every inch of the pantry floor. Then the basement, around the litter box, the furnace. Nothing.
I rush up the basement steps. Near the top, I step on it.
I lift my foot to find the glue board stuck there like an insole. From under my heel, I see two tiny dangling legs and a tail.
Jesus wept!
Lucky for me it is not my wife now stuck to this industrial glue board of death.
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