Plathological

GAME ON. ((photo by wendy- who's quite good at this!))

Yesterday was a feeding frenzy of minor pain and misfortune. It all started with a shuffling among the plastic bags under our kitchen sink some weeks ago, the shuffling intruder identified by our dual genius power as a mouse. Go figure. Graeme ends up opening the cupboard door one Saturday afternoon, and POW, the thing bursts out into the apartment, brushing against Graeme’s foot as he’s walking toward me, and hiding. Hiding as those slippery mice-fucks tend to do, behind and under things. After much chasing and cornering and flipping things over and standing on things as our skin crawled and twitched in disgust, we located the mouse-fuck behind our floored bedspring by the wall. At that point, we attempted a barricade at both points of entry but little did we know, mice-fucks can fly. We did not learn that they can fly two motherfucking feet into the air in a single godforsaken bound until last night. But I digress – that Saturday afternoon turned into Saturday evening, whereupon the mouse-fuck jumped or climbed or whatever, over what we now know to be a pathetically low barricade for the thing’s Darwinian abilities. We assumed it scurried back into the hole under the kitchen sink from where it came, as throughout this ordeal, we’d left the cupboard door open. Right under our noses! We taped the hole of entry with wide, clear tape. We removed all the plastic bags from under there. The thing, we reasoned, no longer deserved its nest for the terrifying ordeal it put us through.

We were right about the damn thing going back from where it came; yesterday, I heard the mouse-fuck shuffle-shuffle-shuffle all fucking day under the sink. I won’t lie: I got creeped out. Super creeped out. So creeped out, in fact, that out of what I can only define as desperation and terror, I taped the door of the kitchen cupboard shut, just to, you know stay safe by making sure the walking shit-with-legs stays away from me.

Graeme came home from work with a plan. His engineering mind-in-waiting devised a barricade. This time, it was higher. We surrounded the kitchen cupboard with boxes filled with books, his guitar case, and stuffed all nooks and crannies of escape space with old rags. Graeme steps into the ring, his rubber gloves and cookie tin at the ready. We take a collective breath and he opens the door. Nothing. He removes one of the few since-accumulated plastic bags, shakes it in the air. Nothing. He removes another bag, shakes it again. Still nothing. We don’t say anything to each other. He removes a couple more bags and still nothing and more nothing. Eventually, he takes out the final bag. That’s when the thing shoots out into our arena. I won’t lie, we screamed. We both screamed. At the same time, at the same pitch. After some struggle this way and that, Graeme finally got the cookie tin over the mouse. It squeaked. It squeaked and squeaked in distress. I won’t lie: there was no part of me that found this squeaking even remotely adorable. On the outside, I'm grinning stoically, maliciously like an emperor about to turn his thumb down, on the inside I’m jumping for joy. Blood. Victory. Let’s get this thing out of here.

We slip a Mozart record under the tin. More squeaking as the thing is forced to stand on the moving object. Another victory. We think we have the thing trapped. Well, so, damnit it all: we were wrong about that. We took a grievous turn at this point; we made a massive mistake. Instead of simply lifting the tin and the record and taking the thing outside to dump it in a nearby square filled with crackheads and their snarling dogs, Graeme replaces the hard surface of the record for the soft surface of a thin magazine, which he proceeds to tape to the top of the tin. Needless to say, at this point I have spent enough time with the mouse to start thinking like the mouse, and I see a flash of escape in my mind. The flash proves to be true, when, during the taping process, through a millimeter of given space, the mouse-fuck squeezes past Graeme’s hands working away at entrapment and LEAPS, I kid you not, LEAPS out of the tin, and OVER THE TWO-FOOT BARRICADE, toward the floorboards and behind the stove. Graeme curses, I feel super defeated and bummed. Collectively, we stand and stare, both feeling super defeated and bummed.

The kitchen, if you must know, is still barricaded. And by that I mean: the entry to the kitchen is barricaded with a large Van Gough painting of sunflowers. Life with terror, part three.

The “pain” part of this entry comes when Graeme has some sort of “sleep-twitch” last night and punches my opened and startled eye with his stubbly chin. It hurt like hell. I won’t lie, there was a moment there where I thought I’d have to walk around with an eye-patch for a week. And all this after I checked my transcript yesterday afternoon, and found out I’m graduating with distinction and all I wanted to do at that point was to post an entry with large, capitalized, swirling and sparkling bright pink font ala a sixteen-year-old added on myspace, announcing this fact. God knows I would have deserved it. This mouse-fuck has now kept us from two, TWO get-togethers with its obtrusive presence. . Boo.

Posted by caroline at May 24, 2007 4:40 PM