Unintended consequences

Sirenita wrote a lovely post recently, a series of vignettes of the vermin in her life. Like the scent of Proust's madeline, it evoked memories...

Don't get attached to him -- especially don't give him a name

When I was in high school, one of our cats, Fresser, was a Mighty Hunter.  Fresser is Yiddish for the kind of glutton who sucks down a refrigerator without batting a lip. He earned the name; in his heyday, he supplemented his already-quite-adequate commercial cat food diet with the local wildlife. Well, as wild as it gets in New Haven.

Yes, I commited a cliché: I (with my brother's help) rescued a mouse from the growling cat. I don't remember how my brother and I managed to winkle the mouse away from The Mighty Hunter, but I do remember that we brought it to school and gave it to our biology teacher.

Our teacher cautioned us against getting too attached (as above) and naming the critter. Our reply? "Who, Oscar?" She put the little fellow in a cage with one of those running wheels. I remember my classmates placing bets on how many times the mouse could coast after running up some momentum.

At least she didn't feed Oscar to either of her snakes (Victor Constrictor and Julius Squeezer). If he ever became snake food, it happened after I graduated.

Booger

My brother (ETL from this time forward) was living in a 3-person household during the early nineties.They got mice. ETL twigged to it when they started snacking on his Pop Tarts. You do not want to come between my brother and his Pop Tarts. He named his little uninvited housemate Booger.

I was sitting in his kitchen drinking tea when we heard the telltale scrabbling noise. ETL handed me a colander, armed himself with a broom, and headed into the pantry to Confront the Beast. As mousers, well, um.... we drink a mean cup of tea.

One of his housemates was violently allergic to cats, so he fell back on mechanical means. ETL's a merciful kinda guy, so he got a mouse-sized hav-a-heart trap (live trap). He tried some traditional bait like peanut butter, leftover Chinese food, etc., but this mouse had a serious sweet tooth. Frosting mix did the trick and Booger, on a serious sugar high, went for a long ride on a short commute, to be released in a woodsy little area in the city.

Either Booger knew his way home, or he had invited his friends and relations... the Pop Tarts remained under siege.

When the allergic housemate moved out,  ETL decided to use nature's own weapon: he hired a hit cat. Said cat had a good reputation for mousing. She also lived with 2 other cats, a few gerbils, 2 rambunctious kids, and perhaps a ferret or two. When she got to ETL's house, she looked around, noticed the peace and quiet, and promptly curled up at the foot of ETL's bed to catch up on her catnapping. No mouse corpses ever appeared, but her presence seemed to have been deterrent enough. Exit mice.

 Mouse hockey

I've pretty much always had cats, so I assumed I'd never see mice in my home. It was an unexpected pleasure when GreyCat came up to me, meowing around a mouthful of mouse. She was pretty smug. I was pretty horrified.

I had thought my indoor-dwelling cats were complete cream puffs. Clever, yes; bloodthirsty, no. H'mm.

GreyCat isn't a selfish beast, so she shared her fun with CalicoCat. They moved the mouse into my bedroom and started playing Mouse Hockey with it.

Then they lost the fucking mouse. In my bedroom. My very very cluttered bedroom with piles of papers and books and clothes everywhere. They patted a few piles of papers, looked under a few t-shirts, shrugged at me, and went about their cat business. 

I couldn't assess the damage to the mouse. Was it OK? Was it Dead Mouse Walking? Would I find a decomposing body in a few weeks? Even if I found the mouse, what in hell would I do with it? I couldn't let it suffer.

So I called ETL (remember? my brother with the hav-a-heart traps?). His response? "Don't expect me not to laugh long and loud."  Not a surprise, that. His traps were on loan to a mouse-plagued friend. No joy.

I completely balked at the idea of finding and killing a living creature manually. More sarcastic laughter from ETL. He suggested that, when I finally found it, I put it out on the back porch in the 20°F cold. Too inhumane. Well, next option: drop a book on it. I whined that I couldn't drop a book like Harry Potter VII on a mouse. He recommended Wikipedia.

I settled on a tried-and-true option: denial. I gave the cats a dirty look and said "This never happened." I went to bed, hoping that the Laws of Nature would be suspended Just This Once, and the mouse would vanish, as if it had never been.

The next morning I heard skittering and meowing again. I looked at the cats, said firmly "Do your duty. I'm giving you an hour,"  and shut them in the bedroom. An hour later, I opened the door to a neatly-laid-out mouse corpse (not even mangled!). I shoved it into a plastic container, slammed the lid on, and took out the trash immediately.

The Scottish Play

I've always been vaguely superstitious about naming The Scottish Play backstage, but the following incident made a True Believer out of me.

As I was applying makeup in the dressing room, I carelessly mentioned an Orson Welles production of an all-black version of TSP -- without using the appropriate euphemism.

Within 15 minutes, it started pouring rain. Two dead rats (see? there's the connection) blocked the drain behind the theatre, and the stage got flooded. We had to hold the curtain for 15 minutes while the wet/dry vacuums were summoned.

Two dead rats: irrefutable evidence that Something Out There heard me.

Never again.