The Cost of a Mouse Infestation

by Aubrey Henretty

The Feynman Lectures on Physics, boxed set: The New Millennium Edition: $134.29
I promise this is related. I have mice in my apartment. A lot of mice. The people at the building management company told me it was a building-wide infestation until a few weeks ago, when it became a my-apartment-only infestation. They’d been diligently bombing mouse nests in the courtyard and eradicating mice from the other apartments for some time, so when I called to report that I’d seen a mouse sprinting to get behind my refrigerator before I could retaliate, the nice lady who answers the phone (and probably does a million other things) told me the mice were mostly gone from everywhere else.

Anyway, the Feynman Lectures shouldn’t count toward the total because I didn’t buy them — they were a gift.

Comically large glue traps: ???
I can’t even bring myself to Google these to find out how much they cost. The exterminator brought them over after the mice crapped all over the smaller traps and laughed about it later with their mouse friends. The glue traps are big enough to fit a whole bunch of mice on them at once. This will be important later. For weeks there was a huge black glue trap on top of my fridge and three or four of them on the ground near the kitchen, collecting dust.

CVS rubber gloves with aloe (one pair): $3.99
There’s always a pair of rubber gloves in my kitchen because I don’t have a dishwasher and washing dishes dries out my hands in a really serious way.

Plastic bags from the plastic-bag stash under the sink: Free
There are so many mice. I see them practically every time I’m in the kitchen. I see one leap out from behind the microwave and into the hole around one of the burners on the stove in a single fluid motion, as if he’s been practicing all day. I hear them in the wee hours of every morning, gnawing on my furniture and skittering around in the dark.

It’s completely out of hand and I’m not even scared of mice. I keep telling people it’s a good thing this isn’t a spider infestation. But I can’t look at another mouse. My startle reflex, which, even on a very calm day after two or three glasses of wine is at least an order of magnitude more sensitive than a regular person’s, is malfunctioning. Every time I think I see anything move out of the corner of my eye I jump. Where is that little bastard? WHERE IS HE.

Old iPhone 4S: $399; Headphones: $22
What is that noise. No seriously what is it. It sounds like the eagle in the opening credits of the Colbert Report is being tortured by government defense contractors in my kitchen. No such luck. There are two mice in the glue trap next to the stove and they are shrieking. Of course they are. They’re alive and stuck in a glue trap. You’re starting to put it together now.

I’ve been stalling but obviously the only thing I can do here is crank the volume on my phone, put on the rubber gloves, throw a plastic bag over the trap and then drop all three volumes of the Feynman Lectures directly on top of the quivering, suffering heap. Stand on the books. Wait several minutes just in case. I didn’t say take off the gloves. Then carefully slide the books off of the trap and put the trap and plastic bag into a second, larger plastic bag and get it out of the apartment as quickly as possible.

This is not the first time I’ve dropped a large book on representatives of an invasive species in an apartment where I lived. The first time it was the Norton Anthology of Literature and about 400 million ants. There were so many ants that if you left a glass of orange juice (empty except for a little OJ residue at the very bottom of the glass) on the table by the couch like my roommate did once, the glass would be covered in ants within seconds. It was a horrible basement apartment. It wasn’t my finest hour.

Partial rent-reimbursement: -$220
This is the part where you ask yourself whether you would rather have $220 or a life that did not involve crushing a couple of doomed shrieking mice with all three volumes of The Feynman Lectures on Physics. Even for a frugal person like me, this is not a difficult choice. But nobody asked me and here we are. There’s a little bit of glue stuck to the box the Feynman Lectures are in. I wonder if there’s a chapter about adhesives. There must be.

Aubrey Henretty writes about language and critical thinking at wordmonster.org. Photo: Brett Jordon

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