Houston? We have a problem.

Meet Miss Mouse:



Once upon a time, when I was but a wee teenaged girl, my friend Dave came to pick me up for a play date and introduced me to his new pet mouse, Meaty. Having just been purchased, Meaty Mouse was crouched at the bottom of a small brown paper bag, similar to a child's lunch sack.

I was not easily fooled.

"You got a pet snake!" I asked, excited.

"Uh.... no. I got ... a pet mouse." He grinned sheepishly.

"You got a snake. This is totally snake food."

"Uh.... no it's not."

When we arrived at his house it was clear that little Meaty Mouse was indeed snake food. In Dave's room was a brand new tank and in the tank was a bright red corn snake.

"Sweet!" I shrieked. "Can I feed him?"

Dave frowned. "Doesn't it freak you out?" He'd been looking forward to scaring me.

"Why would it freak me out?"

And then I explained to Dave how it was probably safest for his snake if we killed the mouse first, otherwise the mouse could injure the snake trying to protect itself. "How do you kill the mouse?" he wanted to know.

Dave was a kid obsessed with horror films. Monster movies, slasher flicks, psycho thrillers, didn't matter, he loved it all. We spent our weekends covered in red karo, bellies layered in raw ground beef, screaming our heads off at his dad's camcorder. The walls of his bedroom, from the carpeting to the popcorn ceiling, were literally papered with monster movie posters, photos of zombie-bite victims, psycho clown killers, blood, gore and festering wounds. I never could figure out how he slept in there. I was a girl who slept with the lights on in her pink flowered bedroom for six weeks after seeing Bride of Chucky.

What I did next made Dave grimace.

I took the paper bag, Meaty Mouse still inside, and whacked it over the top of Dave's dresser. And then I dumped the dead mouse in the snake tank and watched, with wonder, as the snake whipped it's lithe body around the rodent and began the arduous task of swallowing it whole.

You think you know where this is going. You think this is a story about how Meph has come home and Miss Mouse pictured above must be one of my latest mousetricide victims.

Actually? This is a story about a mouse who wandered into my bathtub and then found herself lovingly transported to a nearby park, while my neighbors screamed and yelled and begged me to drop her in the incinerator.

A mouse. In my bathtub. Did you get that?

I don't kill anything anymore. I can't kill spiders, which I loath and despise, let alone small fuzzy mammals. I grew up to be so opposite being able to kill small creatures that this one time, Meph rejected a rat and when it gave birth to ten babies the very next day, I decided to keep them all as pets. I just couldn't feed an entire family to the snake. One grown rat, fine. But a mama and her babies? Couldn't do it.

Also? I had no idea the rat was pregnant when I bought her. She looked awfully fat, but I didn't think anything of it. The babies came as a huge surprise.

Do you think animals give birth and then think to themselves, "Whoa! Did that just come out of my VAGINA?" I guess not. I guess animals don't call it a vagina.

Since I didn't have the heart to feed an entire family of rats to my snake, I bought an enormous "rat condo" (god forbid we use the word "cage"), kept the mama well fed and watched her babies grow. When the babies grew into full-grown rats it became very clear very quickly that my sense of smell could not live with eleven rats, I ended up driving them back at the pet store where I bought the mama and making the sales girl promise to sell them only as companion animals. Companion animals for somebody's boa restrictor, I'm sure she thought as I walked out of the shop.

So the other morning there was a mouse in my bathtub. I don't know how she (I looked) got there, but there she was. Not a purchased-from-a-pet-store-as-snake-food-that-somehow-escaped mouse, but a wild-New-York-City-sewer-mouse.

One time? I sublet a studio at 8th Avenue and 14th Street for one thousand dollars a month. I shared it with another girl and our only window faced a brick wall. I could actually put my hand out the window and place my palm on the wall, it was that close. There was absolutely no natural light in that dank little apartment There were also no closets. Instead there was a terrible mouse infestation, thanks to the bakery we shared the building with. I used to lay in bed at night listening to them scurry and scream. They were so loud I was sure they were rats until I actually saw one one night. Before making coffee in the morning, I had to scrub the kitchen counter with bleach, after I'd wiped away all the mouse shit and dried pools of mouse urine. But hey! Our rent was only a thousand dollars a month! (Each.)

Here's this little mouse trapped in my bathtub, and I don't know what kind of diseases she may be carrying, but she's small and fuzzy and adorable. Killing her is simply out of the question. I also don't want to feed her to the python because if she is carrying disease, I don't know how his system will handle it. However? I have two cats. And cats always eat city mice, that's the point of cats in the city, hey! I've finally found something the cats can do to pitch in for ALL THAT KIBBLE THEY EAT.

I grabbed Toby and put him in the bathtub. He was instantly .... bored. He cocked his head to one side, leaned down, sniffed the mouse, looked up at me disdainfully. I thought maybe he just needed some privacy, so I shut the bathroom door and went to the kitchen to pour myself another cup of coffee. When I poked my head back in five minutes later, Toby was sitting regally in the tub, his tail twitching gently, eyes fixed on me, Miss Mouse running circles at his feet.

I switched him out for Amelia who took one look at that little mouse and nearly clawed my eyes out trying to get away. You'd have the thought the tub was full of boiling acid, the way she fought me. Sure, there was the time I bought her the battery-operated mouse-toy and she cowered behind the sofa when I turned it on. But I'd always believed in my heart of hearts that she was a killer. I couldn't have been more wrong. That was the day my cats won the award for Worst Cats In The Entire History Of Cats.

Ultimately I decided to do what I do with spiders. I trapped Miss Mouse under a plastic container, slid a piece of cardboard under her and gently flipped the container over. After I fed her a piece of cheese and made sure she had some water*, I poke a whole in the lid of the container and snapped it on. Then I walked her to the park for her release, amid my neighbors vehement cries of protest:

"Just put it on the ground! I'll stomp on it!"

"Drop it in the incinerator!"

"MAIL IT TO THE LANDLORD."

After I'd released her, I couldn't help but think of what my mother would say when I mentioned I'd found a mouse in my bathtub:

"Oh God. You didn't decide to keep it, did you?"

*I don't usually feed spiders cheese and water. I usually just dump them out the window.