Somewhat Amusing and Gross Mouse Stories

` I wanted to write this one some time back, but I didn't because I was working on another entry. They're fun! Anyhow, mice are a real pain when you have to kill them. They're pawns of our destruction (when we're not pawns of theirs, anyway), because you can't escape them. It's horrible.
` Let's see if I can still remember some of those mouse stories I was going to write (I know, I'm writing second-run things all the time around here.) These all involve Phil's poor mother, except my first one here...

` Dory, from the Medina Writer's Club, also once told me of a mouse-story... She had gotten up in the middle of the night because she had to pee. Innocent enough. She stepped over her dog and did what she had to do without incident, all without turning on any lights. But then... it happened!
` DUN DUN DUN!
` To see where the flush handle was, she flipped on the light for a second, and... eek! In the toilet was a urine-drenched mouse! AAACK! She didn't consider getting it out, especially because it would bite her and get pee in the wound, so it wound up having to try its luck in the sewer.

` Oh, that was depressing. How is she, anyway? Wanna hear some weird gossip? No? Then skip to the next font.

` Currently, Dory refuses to associate with the confrontational, self-righteous Writer's Club Member whom I'll call 'Danald', and so does not come to Saturday meetings in Wadsworth. But she still has to manage meetings, so she goes on Tuesday night, and Danald does not.
` You see? They have worked out the perfect way to avoid one another...
` Yes, the Writer's Club works in tune like a well-oiled machine, though I think peeing on him would have been much more amusing.
` (If she'd had her way, she'd have kicked him out of the club for viciously screaming and cursing at her in front of everyone. But oh well.)

` Such are the trifles of old men and women.

` Anyhow, Phil's mom has gone through a lot with mice. This first story happened last month when I was going to write all this down in the first place. This first story, I call...


` Mouse of the Bathroom Scale

` Phil's mom had a renewed interest in the bathroom scale, as it told her that she had just lost six pounds. At the same time, it was impossible not to notice that it had kept moving around inexplicably, and every time she had come into the bathroom, it was somewhere different and the cats were staring at it.
` Was it haunted?
` Hardly. Apparently the cats had been pushing it all around the bathroom. So her soon-to-be-psycho-ex husband, Mr. Poopyface (more inadvertant gossip!), picks the scale up and... a pregnant mouse falls out! He squashes her dead, along with all her unborn pups.
` Depressing!
` The End.
` Epilogue - She really hadn't lost six pounds! Somehow the mouse being inside the scale had made it give her the wrong readout.
` Double-Depressing!


` Smokey and the Mouse-Heads

` Smokey was a wonderful Maine Coon cat, the size of a beagle, and one heck of a mouser. He was a very happy guy, despite the fact that getting castrated caused him to lose the rest of his male cat-hood. Not that he needed it. In fact, he was able to use this to his advantage one day when tormenting his friend Jackie, a 150-pound diddy-man-dog, who got a little too rowdy and bit his backside. Smokey's truncated anatomy allowed him to pee backwards, straight down the dog's throat!
` Such a resourceful little scamp.
` Not surprisingly, every Christmas, Smokey would always make sure everyone had a present. No one can forget the year he placed five mouse-heads on top of the steps, all in a row, all facing whoever came up to the Christmas-tree room fist. There was much screaming that Christmas, but nobody could deny that Smokey had worked longest and hardest of all catching, slaying, butchering, and presenting his gifts the way he did.

'Twas the night before Christmas and all through the house,
Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse;
Since their heads were placed on the top step with care...
In hopes that the humans soon would be there...

` His moment of glory, back in 1985, was after one of their neighbors had attracted a bunch of rats to his garage and then tried to kill them all. One of these rats - it looked to be about eight pounds in weight - had fled to the basement, terrorizing anyone who ventured near. This was really getting on everyone's nerves.
` One night, Mr. Poopyface was sick with the flu and had gotten up in the middle of the night. He tripped over something furry and unmoving about the same size as Smokey. Fearing that the cat had been killed by the ferocious, snarling rodent, he flipped on the light - only to see the Smokey looking proudly over the dead rat lying in the middle of one heck of a blood stain.
` And so, he was a Pompous Puddinski Polish Cat ever since. But his story doesn't end here. So pompous was he, in fact, that he felt the need to teach the other cats his approved rodent-killing techniques. He taught them how to break their tiny necks by bringing a mouse up to them and throttling it, and then bringing another mouse for them to try. If they failed to do so, he whacked them on the nose.
` He was still an effective mouser by eighteen years of age, after his teeth had fallen out and he could no longer use his patented Smokey neck-snapping technique. A little thing like that couldn't break his spirit, you see, as he had overwhelming rotten-fish breath that even gaggged humans. Though he couldn't bite anymore, he could at least suffocate the mice by gumming their heads until they decided not to breathe anymore. He was still good old Smokey the Mouser, and as sweet as ever. And as all the pets were wonderful enough to inspire Phil's mom to write songs which they recognized were about them, he had his own;

He's a Smoke... Kitty, he's so pretty,
He's a Smoke... Kitty, Puddinski Pie-Pie,
He's the handsomest cat in the kitty world...

` Something-something. She shoulda wrote about his thirst for mouse blood, but I guess she didn't because it's a happy song. Unlike this one:

On the fifth day of Christmas,
My kitty gave to me...
*Five rodent heads!*
Four squealing mice,
Three gored voles,
Two disembered snakes,
And a big, bloody rat on the floor!

` But alas, it wasn't so. Nevertheless, he was always quite the Pompous Puddinski Polish Cat about it.
` The End.
` Epilogue;
` Yes, he died horribly many years ago.


` The Pterodactyl That Wasn't

` One day, Phil's mother was picking up his former room some time after he and I had both moved to Washington. At some point, she had found several little 1980s plastic prehistoric creatures on the floor under the dresser. One was some type of pterosaur - I've seen the thing... it's anorexic-looking with ribs and vertebrae sticking out, and the middle part of the tail and parts of the wings and head are missing. Basically, it amounted to an ugly, gray, melted-looking skeletal lump. Then she had spotted another one nearby, and had held it up to her face to see what kind it was...
` BUT IT WASN"T PLASTIC!
` It was, of course... a flattened mouse-mummy! She screamed very loudly before disposing of it.
` The End.


` Species Identity Crisis

` Baby was another feline resident at this house, a really lovely Angora-like calico who had amazingly soft fur. She was incapable of being cruel or violent, as she never scratched nor bit, and was very kind and loving... even to the mice! Smokey had tried to teach the others to kill mice, and - after many nose-whackings - one of them actually managed to learn. But Baby-Cat... she was... Special. As in Special Ed-special.
` Every time she caught a mouse, she would curl up around it and lick it, purring, trying to get it to nurse. The mice were scared out of their minds, trying to escape, but she'd grab them in her mouth as if to say; 'No, silly. Let mommy take care of you!' True, it may have caused the mice a lot of mental trauma, but physically, they were in no danger and were not slaughtered mercilessly.
` Smokey was very disapproving, but yes, it's not really a bloody story, full of death, after all.
` So I'll make it that way:
` Now, Baby had this incredibly stupid habit of going into the attic on hot days and basking under the skylights. It was even hot enough to bake cat vomit into the linoleum in January, but it was even worse in the summer. She kept getting heat stroke from it, and needed a good splashing of cold water and some air-conditioning to snap her out of it.
` Unfortunately, one day, Phil and his parents were on vacation, and his grandma called - not Poopyface's really scary, insane, sadistic mother, but Phil's mom's not-as-frightening and-more-annoying insane, sadistic mother who still unfortunately lives next door. She had been taking care of the pets, but she discovered that Baby was having a heat stroke.
` The woman refused to even help the cat, making lame exuses such as the water would muss her fur, until Baby-Cat began wailing as she went into cardiac arrest, and died horribly.
` Killed by her own stupidity - and Phil's grandma's too.
` Really, I just threw that in there because something needed to die horribly.


` The Mouse That Lived

` Sweetheart, a long and lithe, brownish-grayish, long-nosed mackeral tabby, was another one of the greatest cats at their residence. Unlike Smokey, she had a thing for enjoying the slow deaths of mice. Sometimes, she'd catch one and rip a foot off, watching the poor creature scramble around three-leggedly before gnawing the tail off or slitting its belly open and watching its entrails spill out. She made the darndest bloody messes. At least, that's what Phil tells me, but it's clear that she liked to torment smaller creatures. Needless to say, she had to endure many nose-whacks of the great Puddinski Polish Cat for her playfulness.
` As this was back when Phil lived at his parents' house during the summer, still working at Bede Corp, he still slept in his old room... and of course, there was a mouse that encroached on it. Chewing up his chewable things, making nests in everything else. He had heard it scrabbling through the understory of junk and buzzing around his head (I didn't know mice buzzed either, but this one did). This went on for years, but he wasn't about to let old age put an end to the conniving murine. Once, he stayed up all night with an arrow, turned on the light switch and caught it climbing up a phone cord, so he whacked it as hard as it could in an attempt to stab it. This only knocked the mouse to the floor, but did not kill it.
` One night, he grew tired of this mouse invading his territory, so he sic'd old Sweetheart on it by shutting her in his bedroom. At first, she meowed pitifully, until she heard it moving around... Unfortunately, she had failed miserably at killing the offending rodent, though she had tried valiently. The next day, an undiagnosed growth in her stomach caused a gastric rupture and she had to be euthanized to shorten her suffering.
` The mouse had won: The cat had died miserably this time.
` But only the battle... not the war. How it ended, it depends on who you ask. Phil says he finally killed it the next day in his bitterness, and his mom said that this was the mouse she had mistaken for a Pterodactyl-thingy.

` On that depressing note, I have to get going now. Sweet dreams!