don't like being no grim reaper

I knew, at a distance, that some little beastie had just stepped onto a trap in my house. Sure enough, there it was when I got home. The side of the glue trap was covered with chew marks, as if it thought the usual mechanism of perforating walls and gaining access to food would somehow save its life. Although, perhaps it didn’t realize that its life was ending on this strange morass which seemed to have encumbered its paws. It might have found this simply strangely annoying until I came home and found it.

I picked up the trap, looked it in its beady little eyes and began to deliver the usual lecture about marching through my kitchen uninvited. I couldn’t help but notice, though, the fine detail of its whiskers and paws. In another circumstance, we could have been friends. In another time it could have been a pet to whom I’d feed nuggets and I’d be an owner upon which she’d climb.

I notice a puddle come out from underneath it. This animal is so afraid that it has urinated. I talk to it calmly as I get the plastic bag ready but it doesn’t go to its end stoically. It writhes and squeaks, complains and claws at the air all the way into the freezer. It wants to live even if it doesn’t so much understand what its life is for.

Something bigger could come along and make much the same decision about me. In fact, I think some such thing does. It’s perhaps a corporation or a government tapping my funds and shaping my habits. It sends me off to my life squealing with complaint. Surely I was meant for more than paying bills! Surely this mouse was meant for more than just scurry scurry. I was meant for more than being the hangman of rodents. I can’t do this anymore. Each mouse I dispatch gnaws a little more at me. This one makes two mice in one day, five since last Tuesday. I caught them all alive. I looked at all of them in the eyes, determined their lives to mean less and put them to the kindest end that I know how. I hate this job. I can’t live here anymore.

“In the case of an emergency, the walkway will light up to show the nearest exit.” I heard that line time and again, sometimes through half sleep, as I made my time zone tour this summer. I see that lighted pathway now. Soul emergency! Time to make an exit!