Stephanie Gayle

I miss Tracey. She went to Chicago for two whole weeks, leaving me in charge of keeping the garden/lawn and houseplants alive. And she's not here so I can't enjoy her company. Plus, there's one more thing. Tracey takes care of the wee mice who have, on past occasion, made it into our home.

We have these black box traps which zap the mice when they enter the box. Yes, zap dead. Feel free to rail at me.
Last night I saw something just out of the corner of my eye. I turned. On the floor, by the pantry door, the black box's light was flashing green. Crap, I thought. I looked at the box by the stove. No flashing light. Double crap.

I really, really missed Tracey. But I took a couple of deep breaths and grabbed several plastic bags. Then I realized I'd never opened a "full" trap before. More deep breaths. I decided to check how it worked on the non-flashing trap before I got the dead mouse from the flashing trap, so I bent down, and lifted the hinge and DEAD MOUSE!!!! Damn it! The non-flashing box had the dead mouse. I'd gotten my signals confused. Blinking: empty. Not blinking: full.

Luckily, I had bags at hand a strong stomach because this poor thing had been dead for some time. I gagged, tried to get its sad corpse into the bag with as little jiggling as necessary. Then I bagged those bags and took the animal once resembling a mouse to the garbage.

This did not make me enthusiastic about the dinner I was preparing. I washed my hands a lot and deodorized the air and breathed in and out. Then I reset the trap so that the light blinked. But during dinner and for several hours afterward I kept thinking of that sad little mouse's body, that looked like a cat toy with torn seams.

Flash to several hours later. I'm typing at my desk and Kayla comes upstairs to say she thinks that there's a mouse in the trap. "Another one?" I'm astounded. Luck is no lady, I'm thinking. But then after a minute I realize she made the same mistake I did and thought the blinking light meant there was a mouse inside. I assured her this was not the case and that I knew this from experience.

I've been looking at the traps ever since, making sure they're blinking. I hold my breath between the time I first set eyes on it and when it blinks (it's maybe one second but it feels like forever). Let's hope the lights keep flashing, shall we?