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always snap traps
2013-07-25 - 12:28 a.m.

An exterminator left a few glue traps in my apartment a few months back.

Monday afternoon I stepped off the bus on 34th Street, the same spot where I got on Thursday evening, and I rode the train back to work.

I got out at 10 PM, and when I got home I sat down in the kitchen. I spoke to my mother on the phone while I reheated the food I'd traveled with from Boston. While I did this I heard squeaking.

We have a moderate population of rats living in our backyard, so I assumed that the noise was coming from outside. By the time I'd hung up the phone, I'd realized that the sound was too loud to be coming from beyond a pane of glass. I stomped around the plastic bags on the ground, still full of Matt's pantry food. I kicked the wall and took note of the space between it and the baseboard, along with the mass amounts of steel wool shoved in some of the crack.

Finally, I leaned over past the dented and rusted food shelves and peered into the dark corner. The glue trap was a triangular prism. It looked empty until I leaned even more forward, and I saw a mouse stuck to the far end of the trap.

I sat back down at the kitchen table for a few more minutes and ate crackers. I hoped it would be dead by morning then I went to bed.

The next morning, Tuesday, I woke up a few hours early to go for a run. I saw Matt for the first time, exchanged good mornings and told him about the mouse. He didn't seem at all motivated to deal with it.

I put on my shoes and ran to and through the park, writing lyrics to a chorus in my head. The dark feeling that had been blooming inside of me since last night stretched further. Being back in New York, back at work. I thought that when I got back I would march straight back into the kitchen, pick up the mouse and throw it out.

I maintained that feeling until I walked into the apartment. I wasted some time trying to find a long enough pole to gather the trap. Nothing fit into the corner between the shelving and the wall, so I ended up reaching in with my hand.

It kept trying to jump off the trap, and I had to tell myself that there was no way it could muster up the strength to actually break free of the glue. The trap was heavier on the mouse side when I picked it up, that end sagging so the mouse was almost vertical. It still held fast to the glue. I put it into a small plastic bag and walked it outside while Matt watched.

I wondered which was better, death by suffocation or by blunt force to the neck. I also wondered if the bag was airtight enough to suffocate the mouse.

Today was Wednesday, and on my lunch break my college roommate, Jess who lives in Chinatown, messaged me to tell me that there was a mouse in her glue trap, she couldn't touch it, and would I please come get rid of it.

I marveled at the coincidence for a few seconds, and agreed to visit her after work to take care of the issue.

When I got the her apartment, she showed me to the glue trap. I asked for a plastic bag, and we moved her wine rack to get to the glue trap. Her mouse was bigger than mine, and wasn't even a mouse but a small rat.

I brought myself back to the day before, assured myself that this mouserat didn't have the strength to push off of the trap. I jumped a little, but not visibly, when the mouserat tried to pull its bloody face off the glue. It made way more of an effort than yesterday's, but ultimately failed, too. Jess may or may not have been taking photos, video, or texting her roommate.

The mouserat went into the bag, and I walked towards her trash bins outside her apartment. The bag looked so much thinner, and didn't seem to be airtight. If the bag swung a certain way, you could see inside of it.

Jess followed me through the hall, hopping on one foot while putting her shoes on, saying that we needed to stomp it, otherwise it would just starve to death in the trash.

I refused, saying that it could be more painful for the mouse if it took more than one stomp to end it, and I wouldn't have the stomach to inspect to see if it was dead. I flat out told her that I didn't have the stomach to crush the mouse, she would have to do it.

I could tell that she was also reluctant to kill the mouserat, and I could also reach deep inside myself and know that if she really begged me to I would bring myself to do it. She didn't, though. Instead, she weakly rationalized dropping a trash barrel onto the bag. From twenty feet I could tell that he barrel wasn't heavy enough or shaped in a way that would do the job. She picked it up anyway, dropped it down on the orange plastic bag, looked at me pleading me and said It's dead, right? while moving the barrel back.

I went to pick up the bag and as I lifted it the mouserat jumped and she moaned. I looked at her, said that it was dead, then tossed the bag in the trash. She seemed like she wanted to protest, and when I walked past her and back to the apartment she looked back at the barrel, then followed me.

She asked me if I was hungry after I sat down, and I laughed. She grabbed some strawberries from the fridge, and when I bit into the first one I thought of the mouse's head, and crushing it.

I wanted to be sick about this thing, but I wasn't. I pushed the thought away, away until this past hour.

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