Of mice and (wo)men
We’ve been battling mice in our garage, with two known dead so far and the D-Con still being eaten regularly. We also have D-Con in our storage rooms in the basement – out of reach of the cats of course – thanks to Jason’s “hypothetical” run-in with a rodent last weekend. The D-Con there hasn’t been touched.
Until last night. I was looking in one of the storage rooms for something, when about a foot and a half from the D-Con box, I saw a mouse curled up in the corner.
After girlishly whining, “Eeewwwww,” I decided to be a Big Girl and handle it myself. I gingerly picked up a pencil and thrust-stabbed it at the gray, fuzzy lump. Nothing. As I reached for it a second time, holding my breath, Sunny burst through the door and rammed me in the back with her furry little head, giving me what only can be medically described as “Early Onset Heart Failure.”
After depositing her squirming body out of the room, I poked at the mouse again. Turned out it was stuck to the floor. After internally debating whether or not the mouse had been dead for months, rather than hours, I finally poked it enough to dislodge it.
Then I went to Jason and told him, “There’s a dead mouse in the storage room.” He came over, gave a visible start, took a deep breath and grabbed a dustpan as if heading off to battle.
“Don’t touch me when I’m touching this, OK?” he admonished me loudly, like I’d be dumb enough to do such a thing when I myself routinely get startled by watching toast pop out of the toaster.
He attempted to brush the mouse in the dustpan, when we both heard a clacking sound.
“Did you hear that?” he asked.
“Yeah, so? It’s been dead a looooong time,” I said.
“Yeah…so long…it turned into a ROCK.”
And sure enough, what I mistook for a dead rodent carcass that we both shadowboxed with for the last five minutes was in fact, a dirty, dusty rock.
Huh.
