If You Give a Mouse a Sky Box

When we last convened, I had taken shelter in my dark basement lair. Directly under the master bathroom, where Hick stormed off to wreak havoc on a rodent.

One might suppose it is a simple matter to unscrew a light cover and place a mousetrap inside. One would be basing that supposition on how a normal man's mind works. One might THINK one knows...but one has no idea.

From up in my bathroom arose such a clatter, mice 'round the world stirred to see what was the matter. Seriously. No way should a man with a step-stool on a tile floor be making that kind of rumpus. It sounded like a cage match between Bigfoot and the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. Like Hick was driving a Hummer on the rims, after police shot out his tires, down a potholed road paved with Tungsten steel. Like Hick had rented a jackhammer to break up the tile and create a tiny pit of poopy poisoned stakes covered with the bathroom rug for Mousy to impale himself upon while dashing about all willy-nilly after evacuating his bowels in my vent fan light fixture. After fifteen minutes of this stressful cacophony, I heard the creak of Hick's La-Z-Boy. Where he sat, bonbonless, to await the capture.

Within ten minutes, I heard the clunk of the La-Z-Boy. The opposite of the creak. That mean that Hick had catapulted himself out of the chair. I followed the sound of his seemingly footless leg stumps as they thumped across the living room to the bathroom. There was a short scuffle. Then a flush. Then the return stumping and creak. I figured Hick had taken a break from football during a commercial, and was using the facility. Standing right under the upside-down dome of death. Until I heard, "Hey! Pony! Tell your mom I caught her mouse."

"Mom! Dad caught your mouse."

"Did you SEE it? Ask him what he did with it."

"He says he threw it away."

I went to the bottom of the steps. "You threw it away? Where?"

"I got rid of it."

"It better not be in the wastebasket. I didn't hear you open the door."

"I...got rid of it."

"Where?"

"I flushed it down the toilet! He's in the septic tank."

"NO! That's not normal! Pony! Do YOU think that's normal?"

"It's really no different than a goldfish going down."

The Pony chose this time to run a bath in the large triangle tub, mere Hick-feet away from that deathtrap in the ceiling. You're a brave one, Mr. Pony. I wouldn't come closer to that fixture than a 49-and-a-half-foot pole. The Pony enjoys his nightly soak with the coursing jets in a tub long enough for him to stretch out and float. You'd think he was swimming with the dolphins, raising the Titanic, surfing the Banzai Pipeline, or pilfering treasure from the Flor de la Mar shipwreck. Ever since he was little, my Pony has tarried an hour or so in the bath.

When he returned to the basement to plop on the couch with his laptop, I asked if he heard any action in the killing field. "Not really."

"Did you feel like you were being watched?"

"No. Actually, I didn't want to look at that light. There was some kind of smear on it."

We heard Hick hobbling back to the bathroom on the ends of his tibias and fibulas. "Well, Pony, we got another one. He must have come in there while you were in the bathtub. I just flushed HIM, too!"

"Let's not talk about it."

We think those were the only two home invaders we were harboring. There was no further action throughout the night. No more mouse turds this morning. This evening, I asked Hick what that stain was in the light fixture. "Oh, the yellow blob? I think that's a piece of cheese. I need to get it out."

"It's not yellow. Was there a...smear...on it?"

"I cleaned that up last night."

"What did it do, decapitate them?"

"Not all the way."

"What's THAT supposed to mean?"

"It just broke their necks. One of them was a little bloody. I had to clean the blood off the rug after I dropped him."

EEEEEEEEEEEEEE. If you ever visit our Backroads estate, you might want to use the outhouse to freshen up.