Orange Girl World

We discovered mice or at least one mouse in our kitchen yesterday.  Everyone had different advice on what to do; our landlord said to use rat-poison on it, friends said to get a humane trap and in the end we decided to be very old-fashioned about the business and set a mouse trap.

I woke up this morning to find little mice feet under our cabinet.  I should say now that I have a desperate and irrational fear of corpses of any sort.  Just looking at anything or anyone dead makes me queasy.  There are museums I can’t go into because of their taxidermied animal collection.  Now I was in charged of the disposal of a dead body.

I felt vaguely like Scarlett O’Hara after she killed the Yankee deserter.  “Now I’ve committed murder,” echoed in my head.  I was sweating and shaking.

It took a lot of creative visualization for me to be able to pick it up.  I had to walk myself through the whole process in my mind before I could  think about doing it.  I had to keep reminding myself that meat was a dead animal and I could touch it.  Fur coats were made out of dead animals and I could touch them.  Finally I did the deed.  I got the mouse corpse into the bin just in time for garbage collection. 

I just wonder now whether the next time will be easier.  Will I be blunted to mouse death? Will I eventually gain a taste for killing mice?  I hope I don’t have to find out.