it's a dark wednesday morning.
the alarm goes off. nicky campbells sweet scottish accent quietly comes to life on the radio.
i lie in bed and enjoy the last minute of warmth before the day starts.
i clamber out of bed, the nice fug from under the duvet slips off my body; quick: slippers on, dressing gown on, glasses on, dis-organised hair scraped back from face, excepting 5-live on Husbands alarm clock the house sounds like it normally does at 7.10am on a weekday: ticking over and quiet.
i pad down the stairs past mol and liz's rooms, enjoying the sound of their heavy breathing, feeling mean that i'm going to wake them soon from their cosy slumber (when i ask liz what she dreamed of last night she always says i dreamed of you mummy. what did you dream of? and if i say i dreamed of a beach and sunshine she'll say did you go to that beach? where was i? when was it? it all becomes a bit confusing) down more stairs, i switch on the kitchen lights and walk towards the kettle.
something on my left catches my eye.
and through my morning blurred vision i see a slash of red and grey. huh? quoi? i turn back and fill the kettle and put the tea things on a tray. lapsang souchong and regular teabags, one of each, in the tea pot. two cups. oh, i need the milk. i turn to the fridge and again this slash of irregular colour on my work surface by the knife rack. i peer, like an old lady trying to work out a train time table, closer. and then AHGHGHGHG!
i recoil like a reverse jack-in-the-box. blurrrrrgh. aaaaagh. gag. this is too much for the morning.
i'd forgotten that husband had set lethal machinery into KILL position last night - slathered in peanut butter, over the sharpest needle with the strongest snapping mechanism since crocodiles - this was a mouse trap no mouse would survive (or human finger for that matter).
micky is dead.
but the aftermath of this shocking act of murder (i quite like mice; i was thinking we could've trained him to bring us tea in the morning and i'd pay him with crumbs - seemed like a good deal for the winter?) was sorded! not only did mickey bleed torrents of ruby red mouse blood, like everywhere, he also took part in a mouse-death-explosion-trick, whereby some of his bloody-parts, presumably during the snap-section-of-murder, had flung themselves far afield to other places on the work surface. it was like a scene from a tarantino movie, but in miniature.
anyway. my peaceful morning-zombie-state was fairly shattered. i turned my back on the death-scene, filled the pot of tea, remembered the milk (had to look one final time at mickey - who did he leave behind? was his wife with him? what if his teenage son had seen it? he'd be back for revenge, surely...? i felt a small pang of guilt...) and went swiftly back upstairs to alert husband to clean the gore before breakfast so as to not risk damaging the mental stability of our impressionable and innocent girls.
mol asked why the kitchen smelt so 'clean' when she came downstairs. she probably thought i'd had an attack of anal-cleaning-frenzy during the night - nothing that odd about it i suppose.
(actually she didn't but i like the idea of her inadvertently sniffing out the crime scene. she only asked me tonight in her bath if we'd trapped anything... i said, hm, i think maybe we did, anyway, don't forget to clean your cheesy feet, monkey!)
RIP Mickey. A mouse family somewhere will miss you. Our fruit bowl, however, will be a cleaner place.
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1 comment:
I dream of such events in The Larches....my attic needs big time cleansing of all squatters..
Lou
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