I'm asleep in my bed, dreaming about something, and Teacup jerks awake with a start. I wake up because I heard it as well. Right on the edge of my consciousness. It was clattering, getting louder, and inside the apartment. I stumbled from my perfect temperature sheets, half asleep, commando (not the beret and knife kind), and angry/apprehensive of what I might find.
It was a mouse.
The mouse was struggling in one of our traps we'd set in the kitchen. His left front paw was caught in the grey plastic, and he was twisting and turning frantically to get free. The hard plastic against the kitchen tiles was what I heard and it was making a damn hell amount of noise as I stood four feet from the scene.
Then I saw the blood.
He was smearing little stripes of it all over the floor. I felt sorry for him because it was only his paw. I'd had this situation in the past and I guess I did the right thing by setting a snap-trap close to him so it could kill him quickly. Only it didn't. It snapped onto that mouse's legs, leaving him alive and probably in agony. I reset the trap, feeling like the biggest bad guy in the world, and snapped it onto the mouse's head. All of this is running through my head as I wracked my struggling-to-wake brain. I mean, I'd read Redwall when I was a kid. It was great; I loved all those mice whose names began with M and who wielded a star-forged sword. I decided I couldn't handle killing him right then and set him free.
Easier said than done.
I grab the sharpening rod from the kitchen counter to poke open the trap and let the mouse free so he can run under the stove and kill himself on one of the traps later. Of course it flips out because I'm a naked giant moving towards it with a metal stick. The mouse and the trap start jumping all over the place, getting more blood everywhere. I back off and it calms down. We stare at each other; him with his tiny glassy eyes, and me with my narrowed bleary ones. Then I get a GREAT (very stupid) idea. I'll put him outside!
I don my red oven mitts (because I don't want the little bastard to bite me), pick up the trap with the mouse clinging to the opposite side and walk him to the door that leads to my deck. I peer out the window, hoping beyond hope that nobody has their window open and happens to be glancing outside. If they had they would have seen a very naked man wearing oven mitts, sneaking across a deck in the dark while gingerly holding something. So I'm standing on the damp deck edge, the cold wind is blowing right through me, and Teacup's plants are tickling my *ahem*. I pop open the trap and the little guy falls a short distance into the darkness onto the roof located a little lower than our deck.
It's then that I notice my neighbor's window is open, her blinds are up but (thank god!) she's faced the other way. I go back inside, clean the mess, and get straight into bed.
Oh mouse- how I wished you had a jetpack, like in this drawing, so you could fly away.
