Squeaker

The mouse was in the garbage disposal.

That’s right. There was a live mouse in our garbage disposal. I called my husband and then walked out the front door.

“I’m leaving. Do you want a pair of gloves? You can’t turn it on. Oh my God, don’t turn it on.” I said, covering my ears.”I’ll be outside.”

He was rummaging in the drawer with all the spatulas and big mixing spoons. Did he think there was some kind of ‘getting the mouse out of the garbage disposal’ utensil in there? Tongs? Oh, man.

I couldn’t stay. I knew he would give up and just flick the switch. It would be so brutish. And so immediate. Our problem would be solved. But Oh My God, the mayhem, I just couldn’t stop thinking about it. The little paws. I really got stuck on the little paws.

As a household, we would never recover. There aren’t enough lemons in the world.

Minutes later, he came out to the porch with a plate over a plastic refrigerator container. He joked with three college girls walking down the block to class. “Do you want to see our mouse?” He explained how he’d had to rescue it from the garbage disposal because I was afraid to. I looked at him as I so often do, why are we involving these strangers in this, this event?

Laughing, he lurched at me with his little mouse in a jar like a ten-year old boy on the playground. “Just get rid of it!” I yelled and he let it go near the curb and we went back in the house.

“Did you hear what those girls just shouted to you?” he asked me, shaking out the container. “They said ‘you have a great husband.'” Oh brother.

Upstairs while we were dressing for work, he picked up the binoculars to see if the mouse was still there. He was. Sitting up on its hind legs, maybe a little stunned at the traffic. he seemed to be looking up at us in the bedroom window, an older couple with binoculars.

I wonder if he’d ever seen that in his travels in the garbage disposal.

Little blade runner.

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Photo by Marcus Ganahl on Unsplash

Originally published in 2016