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A while back, intuition and foresight had me move a bag of rice from the cupboards underneath my kitchen counter to on top of the counter. It’s still there now.
Around that time, I could swear I saw a flash from the corner of my eyes. A mouse. A fucking mouse in my house.
My place may not be the most organized, but it’s clean. It’s very clean.
In fact, a couple of days after I realised I had a mouse roaming around I noticed a foul smell. A smell I remembered from my youth. A youth when I had Cats. The smell of dead mouse.
It was a terrible stench. A really awful horrific stench which I couldn’t quite place my finger on. It’s weird how foul stenches can’t quite be tracked down.
But I figured it out. It was behind a radiator. I emptied most of a can of air freshener and a bunch of vinegar but I couldn’t tame that smell. Awful awful.. I had to leave the windows open and let the damned dead mouse dry out.
I wasn’t about to tear through decades of paint to open up the wall and radiator to find who knows what in there.
Time passes, and the smell is gone. You’d never even know there was a graveyard to one side of my dining room, such as it is.
Until I realised that there were still mice. Not one but two. I hunted for them until they were underneath my couches. I flipped one and another and another until the two of them scattered.
I couldn’t even tell where they went, they were so fast. Little bastard quicklings the lot of them..
Later that night, one wandered along the side of my place, near the couches. I turned to look. It turned to look. I froze. It froze. I growled at it. It gave me a funny look. I twitched, it fled to the couches.
I pounced, picked up a sandal and broke its back and hips. It squirmed under the couch. I flipped the couch onto it. Yes, I threw a couch at it.
A day passes. I know there is one mouse left. I wake up to see it playing on the windowsill. The damned thing was screwing around and making noise. I look at it. It’s damned cute. I twitch, and it takes a header off the ledge onto the floor and darts around.
But I was smart, I had already blocked the holes to the radiator. I thought that it was in there, and I thought I had trapped it there.. but my blocks still served a purpose.
It fled to a hole, then noticed it was blocked and took off in another direction.. running so fast I could barely see it. I had no idea where it went.
That evening, I see a flash in the corner of my eye. It’s the kind of flash which wouldn’t pique the attention of most people’s intuition.. the kind of forgettable event not unlike blinking.. but I knew it for what it was.
I pull my coffee table away, and flip, flip, flip go my couches. As I thought, I caught it with the last flip.
I didn’t even stop to check if this one was breathing, I picked it up by the tail and flushed it.. giving it the finger as it went down.
me 2, mice 0.
