The One That Got Away

...or, How To Start a Holiday Weekend in a Most Bizarre Fashion...

...and I warn you - this is a long one...

Yesterday was tough. One of my coworkers has six weeks of vacation each year, and I get to fill in for him. It's a high-pressure, late-hour kind of job that has nothing to do with my backgrounds in accounting or literature. Yesterday was one of his days off. I got to work at 6:45am and left around 8:35pm. So, yeah. Yesterday was tough.

Joe thankfully took me out to a local pub - he's good at this. He listens to my rants while I drink pint after pint, and he doesn't make it seem too obvious that he's actually watching the NCAA basketball games. He's wonderful that way. We got into a bit of a row about something I won't get into now, and it happens to even the best of couples. But it was a pretty quiet ride home (two blocks).

We got home, I checked email, and he went to bed. Later, I went up to bed, knit for a bit, then turned out the light. Me, Joe, Otis, and Coz were all comfy in the Big Bed, when I heard Dobby's nails clipping along the hardwood floor about ten minutes later. My little boy is coming to sleep with me, as he normally does. It's such a cozy feeling, a purring cat going to sleep on you/near you. I love wintertime for the snuggles I get from the kitties. I hear Dobby come around to my side of the bed and pause, as he normally does, to jump. Then I hear skidding toenails and lots of rustling.

Odd.

Did he get into the trash bag? Did he get spooked by a shadow?

I turn on the light and see him head towards my dresser across the room. He's making loud sniffing sounds like that bull in the Bugs Bunny cartoons. He pauses near the corner, looking behind the blanket chest. Waiting. Waiting.

Oh, crap.

With a pounce and a scare, Dobby flushes out the mouse, who scurries along the baseboards towards the bed, runs over my slippers, and under the bed.

Fuck.

Joe wakes up, somewhat. Then he goes back to sleep. I sit up in bed, looking over towards the opposite wall. Dobby and Otis are now staring at the corner of Joe's armoire, waiting for the next move.

What the heck am I supposed to do now?

I lean back, try to read a bit, and--nothing. I'm sleepy. I have to sleep. But I am NOT sleeping with this ticking time bomb in my room. The next thing you know, the cats will catch the poor thing, and they'll bring it to bed with them. No way, dude. Ain't happening. I'm going to the guest bedroom.

And so I do. And I close the door and shove a towel under it.

I have a somewhat restless night's sleep, since it's a room I never sleep in, and I dream of beverage cans, mice, and beer. Not in a good way. My restless slumber is rudely interrupted by the bedroom door being shoved open and a grouchy "What the hell are you doing in here" morning greeting. This from the man who thinks I was so mad at him that I slept in another room.

The only intelligible words from my mouth are things like "the mouse" and "did they kill it," and it slowly dawns on Joe that I wasn't trying to prove a point - that I just wanted to get some sleep without a dead rodent being placed on me. He vaguely remembers the mouse conversation at midnight and says that he doesn't know what happened to it. And so we go downstairs.

No mouse corpse in the kitchen. Or the dining room. Or the living room. The front stairs are clean. The upper landing shows no signs. We look around the bedroom and see nothing. Joe peeks under the cat bed near his armoire and finds out that that's where Coz has been relieving himself (more on that horror another day). I check under the bed and see something that doesn't appear to be a sock. I grab a flashlight.

There he is, poor little mousie. Okay, at least we found him. I hate it when they die with their eyes open. Wow, his eyes are really glassy and black. Those were my last thoughts before he moved. Goddammit.

"Joe, get Otis out of the room and close the door." I go and get paper towels and a cup from under the bathroom sink. I kneel down, point the flashlight, and...nothing. The sonofabitch is gone. I picked up my slippers. I rifled through my knitting bag (oh, please god not the knitting). Then the little bastard made a dash from underneath the nightstand.

And then here we were, at seven in the morning - me, in my nightgown, wielding a flashlight and Swiffer mop thingy, and Joe, in a t-shirt and boxers, with a trash can and paper towels - trying to corner this mouse who kept running from nightstand to nightstand on either side of the bed. We finally got him out of the bedroom and onto the landing, when he decided the stairs were a better option than the trashcan we were trying to wrangle him into. Once on the stairs, he took a flying leap (really - mice jump about fifteen times their little length) to the area at the bottom of the stairs where there is a large gap between the wall and the baseboard. It leads to a closet which leads to the outside. Mouse - 1, Weismanns - 0.

And our cats were in the dining room, just sitting around and looking pretty.