Carnage. Or, Our Cat is a Very, Very, Very Fine Cat.

03Jun09

Yesterday, on the way home from work, I got a phone call from home. It was Ella, screaming and laughing, “Mom, mom, mom! There’s a mouse in our house! Missy brought a mouse in the house and it ALMOST GAVE ME A HEART ATTACK!”

Indeed, our cat has brought us things before, but the sitter and my children inadvertently let the cat-with-the-mouse-in-her-mouth in the house before realizing.  The mouse was alive. The mouse, apparently, was running frantically away from the cat.

When I got home, 45 minutes later, the mouse was still in the house, giving no lie to the old nursery rhyme about mice and clocks because, in fact, the mouse had climbed up our fireplace and was clinging to the brick wall right up there next to the ceiling.  It had been there for 45 minutes. The sitter had a bucket and a broom. Finn  was gleefully jumping on the couch and Ella…well, Ella was curled in a chair reporting on it all in her Reporter’s Notebook (an item not to be confused with her Diary or her Spy Notebook or her Notebook for stories or her Sketchbook). Her account follows. Note the shift mid-story from the literary, let-me-tell-you-a-story new journalism model, to the real-time reported action strategy. Because you know, in the future, as my friend, the brilliant investigative reporter has (cynically) pointed out, she just might have to be journalist who only uses Twitter.

The Mouse in the House

By Isabella Heinzen

It was a Regular day. And then my cat brought in an alive mouse. That’s how it got started.  It was black with a two inch tail. Me and Finn and Tiffany helped each other get it down. I called mom.  She said to put blankets under the cracks and I did. And my Dad did not know what to do.  It climbed up the wall so we put cheese on the mantle. We put a pail on the block bin and we used a broom. It moves a bit. My brother is scared and my mom does not want to touch it.  So she is getting my Dad’s work gloves. She is trying to trap it. She is afraid. It is starting to come down. Now I think it is really 100 percent scared. We do not know what to do. Every time we make noise it goes back up . It was looking at the cheese.  We looked up how to get a mouse out of a house:

1. Get a box. Cut a mouse size hole in the box.
2. Put cereal in the box. Attach string.
3. The  mouse goes in.
4. Take mouse outside.

I got a berry box and put honey nut O’s and tied a string around it.  It is coming down shortly. It went on a brick ledge.  Missie brought us another mouse.  She hurt it.

The mouse is going into my mom’s trap which is a box with peanut butter on the bottom. So my mom thinks there is a mouse nest next to our Pink Roses.  The mouse is half in half out.  It is on my mom’s vase. It is coming down!!!!! I am going to give it garlic (bread?). I can not finish. It went out. YIPPEE

This how it got out: It climbed across our mantel, went down our mantel and across our window sill and went out our door.

And because she has not yet decided if she will be a journalist of the print or broadcast species, and it is likely that both skills will be necessary in the new media future, she made sure to record live-action movies of the event, unfolding in real time.

And the stealth version, done because shes “likes the sound effects” of whispering:

In fact, the happy escape of this mouse, which scampered out the door and into the garden, was eclipsed by the fact that our cat proceeded to bring us no less than 7 mice last night.  The lawn was littered with bodies.  And while we suspect they are coming from our neighbors’ yard, where 3 very large trees have just been chopped down, I have called in the experts.

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