Jessy Delfino's Blog

CRAZY MOUSE IN THE HOUSE

I have to write about this for the sake of my humanity and well-being, and what better place to dump my emotional hand-baggage then in a public forum which is read by upwards of 30 people per day?

I'd like to apologize in advance for the graphicness of the post which you are about to read. You've been warned.

Last night after the Naughty Nautical Nite show, Darcy and I returned home with boyfriends and gear in tow. It'd been a long night in addition to being Darcy's birthday party, and we were all pretty pooped and a little bit drunk.

Darcy opened the apartment door to find a mouse on the floor, but not just any mouse -- a mouse doing flips, stunts and gymnastics which would have won him the gold medal in the mouse olympics. I've never seen any creature moving like that in my life. It was something so macabre and twisted, I couldn't even have dreamed it up.

It was lying on its' side, twirling around and around, as fast as it could. Just twirling and twirling, like it was rolling down a hill, but it wasn't really able to move anywhere else besides mostly in place. In addition to twirling really fast, it was hopping on its side, bouncing up into the air a good 6 inches or so, popping like a piece of pop corn.

When I saw the thing, my eyes did some popping of their own -- I was appalled like I've never been and that is saying a lot, as typically, I do the appalling.

Darcy was very calm but obviously upset, because her mid-western housewife Idaho accent came out a little bit. She very casually, if a bit irritatedly said, "Aw, jeez, one of you boys get this mouse out of here." The guys were standing behind us so they couldn't really see what was going on, but when we moved out of the way, they were as astounded as we were. We all kind of stood around the mouse like it was a little campfire, watching it snap and sizzle. None of us really knew what to do, because the thing was moving so fast and behaving so crazily I think we were all a bit startled and stunned.

As I said, it'd been a long day and I was pretty tired and a little drunk, and watching this mouse writhe and suffer before my eyes was just too much for me. I started tearing up and whimpering helplessly, beckoning to one of the guys to do something with it. It was beyond my ability to put it out of its misery or deal with it myself at that moment. I recommended someone pick it up and chuck it off the balcony. It seemed to me like a reasonable way to deal with a writhing mouse.

Then all of a sudden, something came over me. The absurdity of the way the mouse was behaving sent me into an uncontrollable fit of laughter paired with my tears. Darcy, in her Idaho-ian maternal manner, put her hand on my arm and said, "Aw, jeez, don't have a nervous breakdown, Delfino. Get that mouse out of here before Delfino has a nervous breakdown." I was laughing and crying at the same time and shaking so hard, I had to lean against the wall to keep from collapsing.

So here's a picture for you: 1 am, mouse convulsing and bouncing on the floor, four people gathered around it like they're having a seance, one of them (dressed like Alice In Wonderland) laughing hysterically and crying at the same time, one of them (also dressed like Alice In Wonderland) calmly giving orders, two of them (one dressed like a prince, the other dressed like a surfer) trying to catch a wiggling, dying mouse that is spinning cartwheels like it's on fire and is frantically stopping, dropping and rolling.

But the little critter still had some fight left in it, and it spun and popped its way deep beneath the couch and found someplace to hide. We had to move the couch and some things we had stored under there until we uncovered it, whence it began it's mouse-y gymnastics all over again.

Finally, my boyfriend grabbed a plastic bag, palmed the thing and tossed it off the patio, 8 stories down to its death.

I originally thought that it had been poisoned by the superintendent's mouse catching poison and was suffering, but we later deducted that when Darcy opened the apartment door, it was in the way and she'd hit it in the head or caught it under the door somehow, crippling it. I was pretty satisfied with that explanation until this morning when I spoke to my other roommate who said that he saw the mouse in the kitchen earlier in the night. He said that it had been doing the same thing, writing, spinning and popping, and that he was going to also pick it up and pitch it off the balcony but that when he saw the way it was moving, he froze because he, too was so unnerved by it's mannerisms. He said it'd rolled itself under the stove and that was the last he'd seen of it.

What would cause a mouse to move like that? Was it born without feet and had developed a special way of maneuvering around? Was it mouse-y-capped? Was it just extremely athletic? Whatever it was, I think we all learned a lesson last night, and that lesson is that things of any size that are different are scary and weird.