Ralph

About a week ago I noticed that there was a chunk missing from the last two slices in my loaf of bread. From a distance it looked like it was just an extra large air bubble, but when I went to make myself a sandwich the next day I saw that the plastic by the missing chunk also had a hole in it, and that close up the chunk no longer looked like an air bubble. I didn’t want to think about what this meant. And so I didn’t. I bought a new loaf of bread the next time I was at the store and stored the information away in a little subconscious corner of my mind pending further evidence.

This morning, though, I could no longer hide my observation from my conscious self because when I went into the kitchen to get a drink of water I saw little black dots all over our kitchen table. Now, there was a period of several years when I was growing up during which my family owned a series of small pets and so it was pretty easy for me to identify the source of the little black dots. My roommate was still asleep and I tried hard not to make my recognition audible, and tried hard to remain calm as I checked my loaf of bread (fully intact when I made my lunch yesterday). Sure enough, there was a new little hole in the plastic on one end and another small chunk missing from the heel of the loaf.

I swept the table clean (squirming all the while), sprayed it down with Clorox, threw away my loaf of bread, removed any other untouched foodstuffs to safety in my food cupboard, and made a mental note to tell my roommate and call the landlord. I briefly entertained the thought of buying a mousetrap, but then the thought of waking up and actually finding a mouse in the trap—just the thought—bothered even me more than the sight of the mouse droppings right in front ofmy eyes, and that was the end of that idea.

You have to understand that mice make me squirm more than almost anything else. Large, ugly bugs are probably worse, but that’s about it. I once saw a mouse by the trash cans outside my family’s garage in Southern California and it was years before I quite got over the fear that I would encounter another every time I entered our garage. And in the House-on-Stilts in Provo I spent my first several weeks falling asleep to a scratching sound that I was sure was a rodent running behind the walls. I could not sleep entirely peacefully until I moved upstairs where there were no more strange noises.

I’m not sure why mice bother me so much. I have no problem with pet mice. And I’ve read and seen all the books and movies about the endearing humanoid mice who live inside the walls in constant fear of the big, distrustful, ignorant humans. The Mouse and the Motorcycle, The Tale of Despereaux, the cartoon version of The Night Before Christmas, Stuart Little, An American Tale, Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH. Those books would almost make you feel sorry for the little fellows (except that they’re always so darned resourceful and manage to outsmart or make friends with the humans in the end), and in fact if I think about it in a sort of abstract sense, I do kind of feel sympathy for the little creature who’s been eating my bread. I mean, he’s just trying to survive in the best way he can, and it just happened that he somehow found a way into my apartment and a very conveniently-located loaf of bread, and who am I to interfere with his right to a comfortable existence?

Of course, all that sympathy is, as I said, in only the most abstract sense, because when I see the droppings on the table, all I really want is for him to be gone in whatever way is most convenient for me and least likely to cause me to actually see him, dead or alive.

Ugh. I really hope the landlord doesn't just bring us a mousetrap.