I have a mouse in my apartment which I find very disturbing/terrifying for the obvious reason(s) (the main one being that it will crawl across my face when I sleep at night). I have seen it three times.
Once I was sitting on my ___seat writing with my headphones on and I saw it scurry through the kitchen. I screamed, threw You Are Not a Gadget at it (“Well, you aren’t!”—Jaron Lanier) and then plugged up the gap under my stove with criterion collection dvds after liberally spraying Fantastick all over my kitchen (it’s all I had?).
After asking a few Duane Reade’s for the “snappy, mean” kind of traps to no avail, I kinda forgot about it/him (well, we call it Viktor Frankl) and then the other day I saw him again at 1 in the morning, had a minor breakdown, asked the man who I tricked into loving me to come and make sure it didn’t crawl over my face at night (coming to make sure it didn’t crawl over my face at night actually turned out to mean biking at 2 in the morning in mid-December rain, whoops). It did not, to our knowledge, crawl over my face or up my leg or jump in my eyes and bite them, although the frequency with which I imagine these scenarios has not really abated.
Cut to tonight and this fucker is just OUT AND ABOUT. I just caught myself saying, “Hey!” at the mouse. Like, hey, don’t do that! Hey, go back under the stove! I was basically DISCIPLINING my mouse just now. Also in the course of writing this I saw it stick it’s stupid little head out and sort of look around, unafraid and I yelled, “GODDAMN YOU!” and shook my fist before throwing The Best American Short Stories of the Century at it, which made it hide and hopefully flee forever, probably because I can only assume he is offended by Updike as much as the next person.
