A terrible thing has happened.
I have lost count of how many mice we’ve had since the Great Mouse Caper began. I remember that there was one week where there were three. Or really, one half, one whole and one misplaced live one. Then there was a dead one. Then the one I caught, which I think might have been the misplaced one but might also have been a different one entirely. I think it’s five, but I can’t be certain. Apparently, five is the magic number in which one becomes many and a couple becomes I can’t remember.
I had a nightmare last night. I dreamt that the floor was filled with little black baby mice, running this way and that, like grey black marbles rolling down hills. No feet, just scurry. What a scary word, that ‘scurry’. It’s a madness movement that wants to crawl up your leg and perhaps bite you in the nipple.
My dreams are a touch prophetic. Have I ever told you about that? I don’t have deja vu, instead I have little tiny bits of dreams that seem to make no sense and then suddenly, there it is, it will have happened, just a tiny snapshot of a moment. My dreams are sometimes photo albums of the future, only without captions, without dates, without any guide to know which are the photos and which are the drawings from my silly head.
Tilly came into the computer room where I was writing and dropped a tiny mouse. Like a liquid drop of velvet, it raced between my feet. Or maybe I had picked up my feet. Or maybe I didn’t have feet any longer. I just remember that she dropped it; it ran between my feet, under the desk and to the miscellaneous bunch of software and equipment boxes that Esteban stores on the other side of the desk where my computer sits. Tilly followed it. I jumped up and ran into the kitchen to prep a live trap, figuring that I’d lock up the computer room until it was captured, but then she walked into the living room with a little limp parcel between her teeth. She dropped it and voila, reanimation, scurried (there’s that word again) into the hallway, behind a box. I ran into the kitchen and grabbed something to catch it in, but when I returned, it was no longer behind the box. The only other options were in the bathroom or under the sizable gap under the door to the library. Since the bathroom is very tiny, I was able to quickly
Ok, it’s gone. Just as I was writing that, I heard a noise in the kitchen. Tilly had flushed it out of wherever it had been and was playing hide-and-seek with it between my Birkenstocks. Then she chased it behind the garbage. This time, I was prepared with a large plastic canister. I moved the garbage, it shot out and in effort to catch it, I dropped the canister on top of it, either killing it or stunning it. Then I trapped it with the upside down canister, and then slid a FedEx cardboard mailer between the canister and the floor. I did catch a glimpse of the mouse and it appeared to be dead (the many uses of Tupperware), so I took it outside in my boxer shorts and coordinating t-shirt and disposed of it in the storm drain (figuring if it wasn’t dead already, it would be immediately thereafter. That seemed the most humane while not being, you know, yucky.)
I hope it was the same mouse, although I think it was. After losing the thing, I set up two of the new live traps, each with a healthy gob of Jif and one of them was askew, undoubtedly cast aside by Tilly in effort to seek and destroy.
I cannot tell you how unbelievably ready I am for the mouse thing to be over. I simply don’t understand it. We went from having had zero mice in six years to suddenly having the wealth of mice in Month Five of Year Seven. If mice were wishes, I would have a Lincoln LS, a Pulitzer and half a dozen different husbands by now.
I still can’t relax with my stocking feet on the floor.
While searching for the mouse, I discovered a cache of Cyclobenzaprine muscle relaxants in our linen closet. I thought I was out. I pull a muscle in my back (or more specifically, the muscle that goes from the base of my skull to my shoulder to the middle of my back) every now and then. It’s most likely related to the time I dislocated my shoulder. It’s not a big deal, really. I feel it go, fight my urge to weep, then don’t move my head for three days. It makes driving really difficult and doing my hair is pretty much a nightmare because lifting my arm is nearly impossible without screaming. But if I take a Happy Golden Relax pill as prescribed, each night the muscle loosens a little bit and by the third day, I’m almost at normal standards. Now, because the pills are technically a big druggie pill, my doctor will only give me 12 pills at a time. Not really a big deal because unless I pull the muscle on a weekend, I can only take one a night. But truthfully, I love those pills. Love them. Have those irrational lovely feelings for it just like I do codeine and more specifically Tylenol 3. I suspect that I could very easily become a drug addict because I just can’t see a thing wrong with something that gives me lovely dark dreamy relaxed sleep for fourteen hours straight, even in defiance of the human earthquake that sleeps next to me. In fact, if it weren’t for the Cyclobenzaprine, I wouldn’t have been able to get to sleep the night before my wedding (all of my muscles were spasming and I physically could not flex my feet because the muscles were pulled so tightly). So I look my little lovely pill and slept until 8:30 that morning, which is something that is practically impossible for me under normal circumstances.
I had more to write about but now I am inexplicably sleepy. Ok, there’s an explanation. So, yeah, I took a Cyclo. I’m not made of stone. There was a mouse. You would have done the same, so stop with the tsking.
I’ll bet that they use the preceding paragraphs as the prologue to the Weetabix Afterschool Special on prescription drug abuse. Just please don’t use ‘Mother’s Little Helper’ in the soundtrack, ok? I really dislike the Stones.
