If you give a mouse a cookie

a hero's journey

There’s a mouse in my apartment even though nobody gave her a cookie. She’s a woman because she’s fast, she’s smart, and she’s looking for love in all the wrong places. There are no open containers in my pantry. No crumbs left on the counter. No vats of soup waiting for her to add her signature spice blend and blow the minds of diners and critics alike.

There’s a mouse in my apartment and apparently she’s in here because it’s cold outside. Science says she must have come in through some hole in the wall. Like an amazing place that serves pierogies in an East Village basement. 

The man at the hardware store, surveying his wall of pest traps, asked me if I wanted to make “an enemy, or a friend.” There are two ways to catch a mouse- dead or alive. As someone who dabbles in vegetarianism and paying attention in intervals in my ethics classes, I have a problem with killing something in my house. Something larger than a bug. Ethicists are calling this argument “fallacious.” 

You can get a glue trap, where you have to look at what you’ve done, or a snap trap where you should just move out of the apartment completely. Or, for $4.29, you can buy a humane trap. This is where you lure the mouse in with cheese or peanut butter or the promise of a good school district for her children, and then when she’s inside, having her meal, the doors close behind her. She then becomes a prisoner. The next step, says my hardware store guy, through a dense cloud of cigar smoke, is to “take her to the park.”

It’s moments like these where you must consider if you’re the type to deal with problems now or later. In a moment of weakness, I left the store with my humane traps. If my little girlboss decides to find her way in for a midnight snack, and I have to take her far enough away from the house to let her go, then so be it. If any of you reading this want to volunteer for such a mission, that would be accepted.

Mice are quiet and small. They usually appear in kitchens. You can do everything you can to have a mouse-free home. You can do everything right and still, sometimes a mouse will find her way in. It’s not your fault, you live in a desirable neighborhood. It’s cold out, and you are the proud owner of two radiators that you have no control over. They make noises in the night that remind you that you’re never truly alone. 

When I first saw mousellini, she was running across my kitchen floor. Why the hurry? I put myself in her shoes. Maybe she has a family. Maybe she’s running away from her family. Maybe she wants to be an actress and her parents want her to be a management consultant. It’s much too hard out there. The economy, you know. Maybe she’s running from a bad date. From a toxic work environment. It’s so important to understand a person’s story, I remind myself, before I imprison her in a cage of her own cheesy desires.

There’s 8 month aged parmigiano reggiano in those traps. If she’s anything like me, she’s not risking her life for the babybel. I was told to use peanut butter but I haven’t opened my new jar yet and I don’t want to open anything before I know where she is. 

There’s a mouse in my house and I didn’t put her here, but it’s my responsibility to take her out. I hope I can bring her to a new fruitful life in the park. I hope she can meet someone, settle down, and build a house of her own. Just far enough away from mine that I can keep my parmigiano to myself.