Violence against mice preferred

Jason Offutt

There are a number of things I got used to growing up on a farm.

Like manure. It smells like money, you know.

I also got used to animals in the house.

The invited, like our dog and the occasional bottle-fed calf, and the uninvited, like birds and mice.

Loads and loads of mice.

Surrounded by cornfields, our little white house was probably both Heaven and Hell in their little mousy theology. Many never returned to tell of the afterlife, but those that did had stories of the Cereal Boxes of Heaven and Hell’s Steel Jaws of Death.

Oh, and my sister.

I’m sure there were legends of her.

I fondly remember my sister screaming one morning because she’d woken with a mouse in her hand — crushed. I say fondly because little brothers are jerks.

Of all the animals that crept and slithered into our house — snakes, toads, and spiders the size of Matchbox cars — I found some kinship with mice.

At least they were mammals.

My wife, however, grew up in town and, when it comes to mice, she shrieks like a 12-year-old girl. So when I saw the little black shape skitter along the wall in our kitchen, I knew the situation could get ugly fast.

“Honey,” I said in my best bomb defuser voice. “We have a mouse.”

She steadied herself, swallowed and impressively kept her composure.

“You’re going to get rid of it, right?”

When a person goes into shock they apparently speak gibberish. No, honey, I’m going to build it a room.

“Of course.”

“Do we still have some of those sticky traps?”

Yes, we do.

Sticky traps were developed by humanitarians who thought it was more kind to make pests starve to death than it was to kill them instantly.

Apparently the Geneva Conventions don’t apply to mice.

“Yes, dear. I’ll put them out.”

And I did.

The trick with mice is to put the traps where they move and the only place I’d seen the mouse was running between the refrigerator (that little monster better not have gotten into my beer) and the counter, so a sticky trap went on either end.

“We’ll have him tonight,” I told her and went off to celebrate my human position in the hierarchy of the planet.

The next morning the traps lay exactly as I’d left them, except they were surrounded poop.

Given the size of a mouse, it’s amazing the amount of doody it can produce. Sure, manure may smell like money, but a cow never crapped in my kitchen.

Hmm.

I now understood the problem.

I was being too nice, too gentle, too cute.

To get rid of a mouse, the best method — much like Axe Body Spray on a frat boy — is overkill.

Eight steel-spring traps and eight dollops of peanut butter later, I had a mouse with a broken back.

The lesson here?

Life is best attacked with a hammer.

Jason Offutt’s novel, “A Funeral Story,” is available at amazon.com.