When one lives in Boston in the summer, one must expect to have rodents, especially when the house one lives in is a hundred years old.
The good news is that we’ve become adept in killing mice. They pop up every once in a while, and you set a trap to get them. Usually the poison works well because they eat the poison, take it back to their nest in the basement or deep in the bowels of the building, and then they die. Occasionally, a spring-loaded trap is required for mice that don’t seem to die quickly enough.
Not this time. I have the mouse that won’t die. The damn thing has been able to eat the bait right off my traps without springing them. I’ve tried deli meat (the last one met his maker while feasting on rotting salami) and cheese. The current one ate the bait right off the traps, including mascarpone cheese and peanut butter. Hell, I went to the grocery store just to get a jar of peanut butter to use as bait. Tonight, I watched the damn thing eat the peanut butter right off the trap.
I went outside and vented my frustration with Harold, my next door neighbor who is also our maintenance guy. He laughed at me because he understands the frustration. He looked at the poison traps and said that the thing is going to die within a few days because it’s eaten a ton of poison. But to pacify me, he reached into his goody drawer and pulled out a couple of glue traps. I set these things down where I know I’m going to get some rodent traffic. Just to bait them a little better, I put a dab of peanut butter in the middle of the trap. Now, you’re supposed to fold up the glue trap so that they make a little box. Fuck that. I want surface area.
The thing about the poison is that I’ll never know if I really got the mouse. And it’s too gentle if you ask me. I want the damn thing to suffer. I’ve had to scrub the same counter three times in the past week because I found mouse droppings. And when I find mouse droppings, I don’t just clean—I break out the disinfectants, too. And anybody who knows me knows that cleaning is my least favorite domestic chore. It’s another way that I defy the gay genome.
I’ll never be so happy to see a dead mouse.