An Uninvited Guest

A few weeks ago, Lauren and I began to notice that something in our apartment was amiss. While making breakfast one morning, I spotted what I hoped were a few flax seeds, or perhaps chocolate sprinkles, scattered across our kitchen table. I looked at them for a while. Then I looked a little closer, trying to convince myself that they were probably just some sort of seed that had fallen off a bagel or a sandwich Lauren had prepared recently. I swept them up, firm in my resolution that they were nothing to be concerned about, and went on with my day.

The next morning, however, I again noticed more of the same mysterious seed-like specks. Considering that Lauren had been away since my finding the previous morning, and that I had not eaten anything containing seeds or sprinkles or any other small brown particles, I was pretty sure I knew what I was dealing with. Yet I still tried to convince myself otherwise, sure that Lauren would dispel my fears later that evening when she got home. Surely she had eaten something with seeds, and I had just missed a few when I cleaned up the morning before. Yes, that was it. I let the specks be so that she could inspect them later on.

“Okay, you need to look at this,” I began almost as soon as I walked in the door that evening. Somewhat startled, Lauren followed me hesitantly over to the kitchen table. “These little brown things—you didn’t make anything with seeds recently, did you?”

“No,” she replied. We were now both staring intently at the half-dozen or so little brown specks scattered about the table, and the realization of what they most likely were began to dawn on Lauren. “Uh oh. Are those what I think they are?”

I took a deep breath. “I’m pretty sure they’re mouse droppings.” There—I had said it, one of the most dreaded words in the apartment-dweller’s vernacular. “I think we have a mouse.”

We left a message with our super and, while waiting to hear back from him, hoped that the little brown specks would just go away on their own. They didn’t. Each evening we wiped them up, and each morning there were a few more—just three or four, not enough to suggest our apartment was being commandeered by an army of rodents. But enough to know that we did, indeed, have a visitor.

Any doubts we may have hopefully clung to were dispelled one evening last week when I pulled a Reese’s peanut butter cup out of a package that we had been keeping on top of our microwave since Halloween. There, in the middle of the wrapper, was a carefully nibbled hole that revealed the contents inside—or what was left of them, because someone or something had eaten half of the peanut butter cup that I had been looking forward to. And I was pretty sure it wasn’t Lauren. I tossed the entire package into the trash, and Lauren left another message for the super again the following day—still to no avail.

We soon realized that our super was on vacation, and that, if we wanted to catch our uninvited guest in the act of raiding our snacks, we would have to do so on our own. But then, one evening this week, before we even had the opportunity to debate the merits of sticky, snap, and have-a-heart traps, we caught our visitor quite by accident—or, he caught himself.

Having picked up garbage bags on my way home from the gym, I reached into our recycling bin to put one inside—and there, at the bottom of the bin, was our mouse. He was curled up on his side, his little tail splayed behind him. And he was most certainly dead.

I jumped backwards and let out a scream that I’m sure was heard by everyone in the building, a scream that continued as I ran through the apartment and into Lauren’s room, where she had been sitting quietly at her computer until just a moment before.

“What is it?” She looked at me in fear, her eyes wide with concern, as though preparing for the news that our kitchen was on fire. While I wanted to dispel her fears, all I could get out were a series of “oh no”s and “ugh”s as I jumped around her room, shuddering and shaking as though there were five live mice crawling over me, rather than just one dead one that at this point was over ten feet away.

“There’s a dead mouse in the recycling bin!” I finally managed to shout, commencing a new series of squeals and shudders from both of us.

“Okay, okay,” I reasoned when we had both managed to calm ourselves a bit. “It’s only a mouse. Can you just go look at it to make sure it’s really dead?”

“Okay,” Lauren replied hesitantly. “Hold my hand.”

And so we crept back to the kitchen, clutching each other’s hands as we neared the plastic can and its fated inhabitant.

“Just peek in,” I prompted. “He’s in the far corner.”

“I don’t want to, I don’t want to,” Lauren repeated, attempting to retreat back to her bedroom while I pulled her toward the bin.

“You can do it,” I encouraged. “I’ll look with you.” We tiptoed toward the bin, our knuckles now white from gripping each other’s hands so tightly. We leaned forward and peered in, both hoping that my earlier sighting had just been a figment of my imagination.

Nope. The mouse was still there, and he was still dead. After more screaming and jumping and shuddering, we realized that the critter was actually kind of cute—and, feeling sorry for him, we tried to figure out the cause of his demise.

“Maybe he just climbed in there and couldn’t get out and then died of starvation,” I offered. “But he wasn’t there this morning. Can mice starve to death that quickly?”

“I think he was on the kitchen table, walking along like this.” She demonstrated with her fingers as though a rodent CSI detective. “There was no food up here, so he peeked down there and slipped and fell. And then broke his neck.”

“Maybe he felt guilty after gorging himself on Reese’s peanut butter cups and jumped on purpose,” I suggested.

After resigning ourselves to the fact that we may never know what really happened to our dead little mouse, we began to consider our options for his disposal.

Flushing him down the toilet was mentioned, as was a burial service in Carl Schurz Park, before we narrowed our options down to two more manageable ones: we could try to dump him from the recycling can into the regular garbage, thus salvaging our plastic bin; or we could just throw the whole thing out. We opted for the latter.

After getting the entire bin into a garbage bag, a process that took nearly ten minutes due another wave of screaming, jumping, and shuddering, I volunteered to bring the whole thing down to the trash.

“Hey,” I called on my way out the door. “Do you think mice are recyclable?”

“This one certainly thinks he is!” came the reply.