Cat's Eye

Yesterday, as my wife and I were preparing to turn in for the night, she gave out a little squeal. Now, if I'm the cause, I don't object, but she'd gone to the kitchen for some water while I headed for the bedroom.

So, being the man that I am, I looked over to check it out.

"What?"

"There's a mouse in our kitchen."

I look down and, sure enough, not a foot away from her big toe was that grey fuzzy critter referred to as "mouse" in the English language. I look around. I'm thinking of just telling the thing to shoo, but that, of course, leads to the most logical conclusion: shoe.

I'll just hit it with a shoe. Not that it's likely to be there when I get back. Mice are known for being rather skiddish. Heck, if I turned my back and started stomping around it was very likely to depart. So I did that, pretending to look for a shoe.

After sufficient stomping, in my opinion, I whisked up one of my dress shoes. The kind with a heel on it and about 4 lbs of patent leather. Understand that it's reasonable for one of my shoes to have that kind of weight because my feet are about the length and width of Yugos.

I turn around and look for mouse.

Mouse is still there, breathing excitedly. That's really disturbing.

In a hushed conversational tone, I ask my wife to move. "For sure the mouse will clear out when this happens," I think.

"Haha!" thinks the mouse, "they are going about their giant lives, oblivious to my shadowy presence!" There is a dramatic pause in the mousey thought processes as he notices a certain... weight in the air.

The mouse doesn't even twitch as I drop my dress shoes on him.

My wife has thankfully departed the area. I've squished many a bug in my time... some of them quite large and nasty, but this was the first time a mammal had died owing to my direct actions (the squirrel that jumped in front of my car that once was committing suicide, and I was merely the vehicle of his deliverance from this earth). Having a large weight dropped on one tends to produce 2 noticeable effects:

1) The subject is significantly flatter. Would that the mouse were alive, it could easily invade places it could not have done previously. I'm sure this would have been on its mind almost immediately.

2) The subject is remarkably wider. And, by "wider," I mean that it occupies far more horizontal space than it once did. Sadly, not all of it was contiguous.

I did a visual post mortem on the afflicted to discover that it had lost several organs which needed to be recovered, those being:

left eye
portions of the brain, mostly the frontal lobe.

and, last, but definitely not least:

Sweet merciful heavens somebody tell my it didn't loose its intestines upon my kitchen floor.

Well... poop.