There is no dignity in death.

For two years now, our apartment has been the scene of an ongoing battle – an epic battle between good and evil, between primal instinct and evolved intelligence, between MAN and BEAST.

Which is to say, we have a mouse problem.

It started as soon as we moved in. It was impossible not to be immediately aware of the mice – not when they were fleeing across the kitchen floor every time we came through the door at night, not when the wee hours of the morning were punctuated by the unmistakable sound of chewing, not when I spent the entirety of our first weekend at home vacuuming up mountains of tiny turds that had accumulated behind the stove and inside the cabinets. (Despite all the trouble they’ve caused, I have to give our mice props; they are record-breakingly prolific poopers.)

“This is a problem,” said Brad.
“I’ll give you some poison,” said our landlord.

He did, and the mice went away.
For awhile.
Then they came back.

“Ugh!” said Brad, discovering a fresh sprinkling of turds scattered abundantly across one of our cutting boards. “We can’t LIVE like this!”

And so began the battle. Not just between man and beast, but also between husband and wife, as it turned out that Brad and I do not react with the same level of disgust to the idea (and evidence) of mice hanging out in our kitchen.

“THIS IS FUCKING DISGUSTING!” he would shout, furiously scouring a cast-iron pan which held the latest deposit of droppings.
“It’s gross,” I would reply.
“NO,” he said, “It’s not just ‘gross’, it’s FUCKING HORRIBLE.”
“Why are you shouting?”
“How can you NOT be shouting?!”
“Please stop shouting.”
“I will NOT stop shouting until you REACT APPROPRIATELY TO HOW HORRIBLE THIS IS!.”
“I WILL NOT SHOUT JUST BECAUSE YOU THINK I SHOULD BE SHOUTING!”

And so on.

For awhile, peace was restored to the apartment when several stray cats moved into our back alley. The mice promptly vanished from the premises, and at night, the air would be filled with the squalling sounds of fighting and feral cat sex... but to us, it was simply the Glorious Musical Accompaniment to a Mouseless Existence. From our fire escape, we would watch the big toms humping away atop their hapless ladycats, laughing like loons as we gleefully anticipated the birth of still more cats to kill still more of the horrible mice.

Several months later, one of our neighbors waved to us on the street.

“Hey, I just wanted to let you guys know,” he said. “I called animal control about those cats in the alley. They came and got ‘em all this afternoon.”
“Oh,” we said. “That was… proactive of you.”
“Hey, no problem!” said the neighbor.

After we were safely inside our apartment, Brad looked out the window at the cat-free landscape and said, savagely, “That fucker.”

The mice came back, of course.
I went to the store and purchased poison pellets, which we placed strategically around the apartment, only to find that the mice were wholly disinterested in eating them. The turds continued to appear. The marital strife re-began in earnest.

Another call to the landlord yielded a visit from his daughter, who showed up at the door with a plug-in device that claimed to repel mice via ultrasonic sound waves.
“Are you kidding?” we said.
“But I don’t want to kill them!” she said.

Gamely, we plugged in the ultrasonic mouse-repellent.
They pooped right next to it.

A week later, more poison appeared in the hallways, and the mice went away.

And then, approximately ten days before some friends were slated to be in our apartment for an evening of grown-up socializing, Brad suddenly froze in the middle of the room and said, “Shhhh!”

I listened.
And then, from a corner, beneath the radiator, came the sound… of chewing.
Not only had the mice returned, they were now out, eating our woodwork, in broad daylight.

“That’s it,” said Brad.
“Indeed,” I said.
And so we came to the mouse trap.

The problem, of course, is that mouse traps are tricky, or sticky, or just generally unpleasant to deal with. A traditional trap would pose a hazard to the dog; a glue trap meant disposing of a still-living-but-very-sticky rodent; and as for those oh-so-humane, “No Kill” traps… well, we were way beyond that.

But then, Brad discovered what appeared to be the Holy Grail of Mouse Traps, one of mankind’s most innovative developments: a fully-enclosed and reusable mousetrap that advertised itself as “safe for children and pets” and bragged openly about its clever design and discreet appearance. The package went so far as to claim that one need never even see the mouse – it would crawl through a hole into an expertly-constructed hidey-box, the trap would snap shut within, and the unsightly corpse would be safely enclosed inside an impenetrable wall of plastic. It was the ultimate in mousetrap design, efficient to a fault, a perfect little black box of death.

We bought two.

And then, after several false alarms and three days of obsessively glaring at the still-untripped trap whenever I passed it, this morning’s check revealed that we. Had. Done it!

Giddy with murderous glee, I reached for the trap. This is great, I thought, seizing hold of it and pulling it out of the corner, and I’m so glad I won’t have to see the dead mouse, that’s really good, I always feel bad when I see their poor little HOLYFUCKINGSHIT OHMYGOD.

Because what we have here, dear readers, is a rather unequivocal case of ITEM NOT AS DESCRIBED.




Seriously. Dude. DUDE.

I know I can’t speak for the whole world, here, and perhaps it’s just that we have exceptionally large mice (?), but if I had to describe the particulars of this mouse trap? “Discreet” is not, NOT, the word that comes to mind. I mean, at the risk of stating the obvious, I can see that mouse.

Not to mention that those stiff-and-splayed hindquarters sticking obscenely out of the Death Hole are infinitely grosser than anything I’ve ever seen in a traditional mouse trap. I can handle a dead mouse, y'all; this, on the other hand, looks less like a straight-up dead mouse and more like a piece of misplaced contemporary art from an exhibit titled “There Is No Dignity In Death”, which is being shown in an illegally-obtained warehouse space down by the Navy Yards and in which the featured work is a life-sized latex sculpture of somebody drowning in a toilet while wearing a clown costume.

Which, granted, sounds sort of interesting, but it is nevertheless not something I want hanging out in the corner of my living room.

But I digress.

Back to the good news: The mouse is dead. And I have reason to believe that he was a lone mouse, unaccompanied by fellow rodents, and therefore that the battle between man and beast has finally, finally come to an end.

But if this happens again, we are getting a fucking cat.