I murdered a family

I had been stalking them and I knew where they lived, just behind the water heater in a dark corner of the laundry room. I wasn't gonna murder them at first, I swear. Actually, I thought I had bought traps that didn't kill them. I had bought this same brand of trap once before and it hadn't killed any mice. The squeaky little rodents merely got held in the clutches of the trap, which allowed me to fling them out into the field. I liked this arrangement. I had always felt bad about breaking their necks (or even worse, those horrid sticky traps - what sick freak thought those up?). This way, they were at least out of the house, and my hands were clean.

Evidently that first trap was defective. I set the new one with some almond cheddar spread from Figis (mice just can't resist it and neither can I), and placed it, like room service, in front of the little hole where the heater pipes go into the wall. I had only to turn the lights off and wait a few minutes to hear the tell-tale snap of the little trap. Heh heh, gotcha little devil. I thought to myself,  it's back to the field for you.

For a second, after I flicked on the light, I could see his little legs wiggling and I assumed all was on track. But, as I picked up the trap and walked with it through the back door, I couldn't deny that he was...well not so much...anymore.  Sonofabitch, I thought, these traps are deadly! If I wanted to purchase a humane trap, I would have to drive all the way back to the hardware store.  I looked out across the field. The sun was going down.

The next mouse to die must have gone almost instantly because the trap caught him square on the head, before he ever even got to have a taste of Figis almond cheddar which, if it tastes as good to a mouse as it does to me, might almost make the game worth the candle. Well, there he was, my first willful murder. I washed my hands of the first mouse because I didn't know about the trap, but this one...

I had to face him, so I picked up the trap and I looked closely at this rodent...at this mammal (who for all I know was female). I do not know the exact percentage but I do know that, in terms of genetics, there is very little difference between myself and the mouse who's life I had just taken with full knowledge of my actions.

His or her eyes were small and black. His head was not particularly attractive but one cannot look at another mammal and avoid noticing certain similarities to humans. The ears of the mouse, for example, were cute and I would guess, his hearing superior to my own, but I don't actually know. As I dumped his dead body into the garbage, I thought, I can't keep doing this. I've got to call a halt to these hostilities and go get some kind of humane trap, if they even make such a thing. But, after the first mouse, I had drunk a couple of vodka tonics to soothe my nerves, and in my heightened state I felt a certain sense of fate taking over. And my mother (it’s her house), wouldn’t sanction a ceasefire. She whooped with excitement bordering on the maniacal every time she heard the signature snap coming from the laundry room. “We got another one!” she would yell in a sing-song voice and command me to remove the offending animal.  As the ancient Greeks so often demonstrated, character is tragedy; tragedy is character.

After the third mouse, the cognitive dissonance began to set in. Mice are indeed disgusting. They smell bad and they don’t ask before coming in and trashing your house. They spread disease and, even though I feel dread harming another living thing, I’ll be damned if I’m going to let a mouse give me some kind of god-damned plague bacillus.

By the time I managed to find a humane mouse trap on the internet the next day, the killing was over. We had “trapped” a total of five mice. My great fear is essentially that of karma. I worry about what will happen if a race of superiors shows up and judges us by how we treat those lower than us…those mammals who coveted nothing more than a warm place to eat and multiply. Who among us could fault them for wanting these things? But if a superior alien race were to arrive on our planet and examine its primary occupant, they might find that we clutter up the place and that our feces stinks like shit.