Kimberlee Conway Ireton

Jane and I are coloring in the dining room. I’m trying to draw the yellow poppy in the vase in front of me. She is drawing her million-and-oneth princess.

I hear a strange sound coming from somewhere below my feet, from, in truth, the air return vent. “Sh,” I say to Jane, and we both listen.

Yep. There’s a scritching sound. I look at Jane. She looks at me. “It’s our mouse,” I say and sigh. “Bother. I was really hoping it had given up and left.”

I mean, Doug and I scared it badly enough the night we chased it around our room, I’d have thought the thing would die of a heart attack before dawn.

Apparently mice are tougher than their size would suggest.

“We’re going to have to set traps. That’s all there is to it.”

I tell Doug when he gets home. Fine, he says, we’ll set traps, even though he hates traps. He thinks they’re cruel.

“No crueler than chasing it around with a wok lid and a butcher knife in the middle of the night,” I say.

He rolls his eyes. “We did not have a butcher knife.”

“We should have,” I say. “Then we wouldn’t have to resort to traps.”

But the traps turn out to be unnecessary. Around two that morning, I wake up to the sound of a crash and a scuffle and a low growl.

Doug asks, “What was that?”

I smile in the dark. “I think the cats got the mouse.”

Sure enough, come morning, we see I was right.

Bwahahaha! Game over, mouse.

*****

If you’re new here (welcome!) or if you’re not but somehow managed to miss the first two parts of my mouse trilogy, you might want to read them: Of Mice and Me (part one) and More Mouse Mayhem (part two). I hear they’re mildly amusing.

Tags: in which my rodent invasion is finally over (I hope), mouse