I have had a fascination with rodents ever since I was ten and the cat would bring them into the house. She would leave them half-eaten under the bed or the dining room table, and my mom, the princess, could not bring herself to go near them. This was after my father’s death, and at ten, I was the closest thing to a man we had. So I was assigned to remove the partial remains of rats and mice. My sister recently reminded me that I used to make Mom give me a dollar for each one. Good for me. Probably that was the most money I got as a kid, because my mom only believed in allowance for good kids and I was not to be one.

Once, the cat left me a perfectly preserved rat backbone with vital organs hanging off of it under my desk. The desk was my prize possession. My father had bought it at the unfinished pine furniture store and sanded and stained it himself. Did a good job, too, although he was not really the handy sort of guy. I dragged that desk around for 20 years, until a boyfriend gave it to someone to pay a debt. Mystifying. It was worth nothing to anyone and it was an unbearably mean thing to do. But I still remember the rat nestled under the skinny, modern legs of my childhood desk. Never having seen a photo or diagram, I could only guess at what the internal rat structures were that the cat left for my (dining?) pleasure.

We humans once caught a mouse. We used a trap. My aunt set the trap. Mom did not go in for that sort of thing. Mom was serious about us kids understanding the world, which, when you think about it, is quite remarkable. We weren’t raised much at all, in the sense of learning how to get along in life, but it was fine in our household to be curious and even critical of things. So Mom explained how the mouse trap worked. It was similar to a guillotine or possibly a hanging. The mouse took the cheese, and a strong spring sent a metal bar precisely onto the back of his neck, breaking it instantly. The trap was set and we went to bed. The next day, we looked. Mom explained that this mouse had been quicker than most mice, because he had retreated too far when he heard the trap spring and the bar caught him on the nose, suffocating him. I looked at that mouse with his dented nose with a deep pity that I can still recall today. For having quick reflexes, he missed out on a merciful death.

Perhaps part of the fascination with dead things was my mother’s horror of them. As a kid (and still) I just needed to hear that something was terrible, dangerous, for me to want to try it. I remember her panicked “Put that down!” when I picked up a dead seagull at the beach. I understood that dead seagulls were seething with masses of germs and parasites, but they had pretty feathers and how else were you going to get close to a seagull if it wasn’t dead? Rodent tails were thought to the an exception to the general rule that you didn’t touch dead things. Rodent tails did not support colonies of infectious life.

In my 20s, I lived in Arizona with Tim. It was the era of my worst social and personal disasters, most of which were not even my own fault, which is saying a lot. When I think of Tim, I remember how he didn’t want me to have sex with anyone else, which meant no sex at all. But in fact, he was a pleasant, well-mannered, easy-going man and the area on the outskirts of Prescott where we lived was spectacularly beautiful. We lived in a rented double-wide mobile home at the edge of a neighborhood that bordered an Indian reservation. On the other side of the fence was a wild area. We got a lots of wildlife in the house, often at the invitation of the cat. The cat was not committed to killing; he ran a catch and release program. The house had lots of tailless lizards, and once I caught a tired mouse with my bare hands. I’m sure he thought he was my lunch, but I just put him on the other side of the fence. Once there was a road-runner, which the cat apparently persuaded to come in with him. There was no way the cat could go through his cat door with a road-runner crosswise in his mouth, so the bird must have cooperated. The bird was fine. We let him out.

One critter the cat did not invite was the skunk. I came home one day, went in the door, turned the corner and came face to face with a skunk in my hallway. He retreated into the bathroom, and I slammed the door on him, which provoked him. Can’t say I blame him. I don’t like people slamming doors, either. I called around and found an exterminator who said he would trap the skunk and release him alive somewhere else. I paid $50 for that service, which was a fortune for me back then. The next day, the skunk was back. If not him, his brother. I did not have another $50. I was determined to catch him myself.

I made a trap from a shoe box. I turned it upside down, so it rested on the lid. Then I lifted the box and held it up with a pencil, making an opening a skunk could climb in through. I baited the trap with my roast chicken, which I figured was only fair. I taped a paperback book to the top of the contraption so that the box would have some weight. I tied a string to the pencil and hid behind a door holding the other end of the string. The skunk had studied his script, because he went right in. I pulled the string and by a miracle, the box slammed down precisely, trapping the skunk with his tail firmly pointed down. Tim brought the truck and we started to drive our skunk out to the country. I had a change of heart about releasing him in the wild because it was winter and there was snow on the ground. What if he was a town skunk? He could starve out there. So we took him to our favorite restaurant and released him in back. “See those garbage cans?” I told him. “A skunk can eat pretty well here.” I watched him trot happily off.

I had a brilliant encounter with a mouse when I was sick with hepatitis C in 1993. Besides severe fatigue, I had a lot of trouble with ordinary mental processing, not being able to write, drive a car or even think when I was in a bad state. I got up late one night after my husband had gone to bed and went to the kitchen for something to eat, where I discovered we still had a mouse living in the stove. Cheeky little monster, stuck his head up through a burner. I could swear he was taunting me. I was not well in the head at all. I decided to drive him away by pouring rubbing alcohol over the stove. It was the best plan I could think of. Really. I thought it made sense.

An expanse of flame blew up on the stove top when the alcohol hit the pilot lights. I tried to smother the flames by beating them with the dish rag, all the while worried about the mouse and hoping he had gotten out in time. My husband woke up, came into the kitchen, and, wearing the squinty expression of the recently awakened, filled a pan with water and doused the stove. Poor mouse! I hoped he wouldn’t catch a cold. My husband glared at me.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“There was a mouse!” I explained.

“And you went after it with a flame-thrower?” He showed quite a bit of restraint, actually.

The mouse was back the next day. Not even his whiskers were singed. He lived with us until the landlady’s disaster-producing handyman came in to fix a leak and brought down the kitchen ceiling. Fire and water didn’t faze him, but Tony was too much for the mouse.

There was to be one more dramatic rodent adventure, and a cat was involved. Where there’s trouble, you usually find a cat nearby. A few years after the mouse fire, we moved into our first house. It was small, but it was the open-storey kind of San Francisco house where the “basement” is the entire first floor. With all that space, we had a deck built suitable for a gym. I took my entire stock option wealth and bought the world’s greatest treadmill for my husband. I got a rolling kitchen cart, put a TV on it, set it in front of the treadmill and he’s been watching the game while moving ever since.

One day, my husband complained that the treadmill was acting strangely. It was hard to get it moving in the right direction and it didn’t turn off properly. I found a repair business and they sent a couple of guys to do cleaning and calibrating. Being a high-end treadmill, it was controlled by a computer. One of the repairmen told me that mice in the treadmill was a possible explanation for the problems. I doubted his competence. Why--hell, how--would mice live in a treadmill? I brushed off the suggestion. “We have cats, we don’t have mice!”

A couple of days later, my husband complained that the treadmill was acting up again. That night when I called the cats for their evening snack, they did not come. That had never happened. I found them circling the treadmill. I thought, maybe there is a mouse in there. The treadmill has a function where it raises its front end up so that you are running uphill. I decided to turn the machine on, raise the front end, and chase the mouse out of there. Knowing my cats, its chances were better than even of escaping.

There followed a series of shocking events. Instead of raising its front end up, the treadmill made a horrible screech, a drawn-out grinding sound, and a loud thump, then took off running backwards at the highest speed. The belt caught something gray and furry and dragged it around, thumping, for several complete circuits. The treadmill dropped its victim on the ground underneath it, the tail sticking out from under the machine, wiggling.

The cats beat it.

Thinking to put the creature out of its misery, I pulled it out from under the treadmill by the tail (remember, tails are sanitary, sort of). I was holding a huge, heavy, dead rat. The tail had only moved because of the treadmill. Damn cat had the nerve to come back and ask for the rat. I was not feeling generous. I tried waking my husband but really, what could he do? I was very aware that the rat, who had altered the treadmill’s programming by hoarding stolen kitty kibble on the motherboard, had died a death as horrible to him as it would have been to me. My husband did have a suggestion for my shakes. “You need a drink.” It helped.