Monday, 07 July 2003 | Five possible scenarios

Out of five possible scenarios, it was the third best, which I immediately recognized and was grateful for. The best scenario, of course, would be that no mice would bother coming into my apartment at all. The second would be that they visit and leave again without my noticing; the third, that if one comes to stay, it is small and fully dead by the time I see it; the fourth, that it is alive and healthy and I must devise a way to capture it and release it into the "wild." And the worst scenario, that the mouse is injured, and it is up to me to humanely kill it.

I didn't see it for at least half an hour after I came home from work. I saw that the rug was rumpled, and I'd just assumed that my cat had run the length of my apartment and slid into the rug, as she does in rare playful moments. Somehow during that initial thirty minutes I didn't step on it, though it was in the middle of the room, and I'd passed by it several times. I'm so glad I didn't step on it.

A few months ago I'd noticed my cat's habit of running to the baseboard in the living room to a point just under the window, where she stares fixedly and sometimes even paws at the empty wall. It wasn't until about a month ago that I began hearing noises as well—scratches and quick footsteps and small knocking sounds. Finally, last night, came the first distinct squeal. I examined the hole in the floor that's jaggedly cut around the radiator pipe and wondered whether one could squeeze through. Should I set a live trap? Tape up the hole? Stuff something in it? Drop sunflower seeds into it to fatten the mouse up so it can't emerge?

I did nothing, and today I was rewarded with a corpse. A corpse that had tiny teeth, claws bent forward like little hooks, paper ears, faint whiskers, and gray-brown fur. Its eyes were closed. It wasn't bloody, and it looked like it ought to be okay, but the mysterious element that makes it run and yell and eat and breathe had vacated its body, trading places with the mysterious element that makes it decompose.

After taking some pictures of it, I picked it up with a paper towel and we climbed out onto the fire escape. It weighed nothing; I could barely feel it there. I carefully flung it toward the dirt a few feet away and several feet down, so that could happily melt into the earth, but it's light little body didn't make it that far, and fell instead two floors down to the concrete alley around my building, producing a quiet thud when it landed. It bothered me that I hadn't "buried" it as planned, so I decided to retrieve it and try again. But as soon as I stepped into the hallway, another mouse scurried down the stairs in front of me (exactly the second mouse I've seen in my building), and I let it go.