(If you're squeamish, maybe skip reading this. This is another artifact of "the post stuff to get it out of my head" thing I've had going on recently).
The woman shrieks. She was checking the cabin air filter as part of the oil change package, and found a dead mouse. "So that's what that smell was," I think to myself. I apologize to her for the unpleasantness. She says it's not the first time. The replacement filter is suitably overpriced.
A few weeks later, I smell something in my car again. Less cloying, more acrid. I check the filter, and find a mouse nest. This has got to stop. How are they even getting in there?
I set a trap in the garage, and find a mouse the next day. Elation! Vindication! Extermination! It is done. I remove the mouse from the trap, and reset it, just in case.
Soon, there's another mouse in the trap. Well, better in the trap than in my car.
But then there's another. And another. And another. I do my best to seal the garage against entry, but it's an old house, and things don't line up anymore. Anything that could conceivably attract mice is removed, and still they come.
I'm tired of dealing with furry little corpses, cute faces frozen in death. I dread going into the garage in the morning, but I grit my teeth, and speak my new mantra: "nodeadmouseplease."
It happens different ways. Sometimes they bleed out. Sometimes the trap disappears altogether. Sometimes I am visited by a ninja mouse, who eats the raisin, and escapes without setting off the trap. Sometimes, there's a dead mouse, but no raisin left. "The second mouse gets the cheese" may be intended humorously, but it's not funny anymore.
Two of them survive, caught by a leg. I drown the first one in a bucket of water. The second one won't drown, and I get tired of waiting, or maybe I just don't have the stomach for it. I put it in the back alley. It doesn't run away, but just sits there, shivering. When I check later, it's gone. Maybe it recovered, maybe it got eaten by a crow. I wonder if mice suffer brain damage.
And then the real horror. I get used to this. It becomes a mechanical exercise. I get my gloves, open the spring with a screwdriver, dump the mouse in the garbage, replace the raisin if needed, and reset the trap. It doesn't bother me anymore, and that bothers me.
Last Monday was mouse #70. I've become accustomed to killing. I've become a bit less human.
It hasn't occurred to me to stop setting the trap.
