mouse in the house
For months, Dominic and I have heard crawling, scratching and gnawing sounds above our ceiling which suggest that rodents are in the crawl space between our ceiling and the floor of the unoccupied apartment above us. When moving across the ceiling or scratching in place above my desk, they sound like large claws – not bear claws, but not tiny field mouse claws, either.
‘What are ya gonna do?’ If I resided in the middle apartment, I would look for glue traps to buy in Baguio City stores, and I would look for any passage under the floor.
But down here, we’re ‘safe’ from vermin incursion, I supposed. However, I did find a little mouse floating dead in our toilet when we returned from a weekend away in Sagada. But we hadn’t seen or heard a rat alive down here before or after that weekend … until now.
I have been eating some dark chocolate many days, and I’ve left a wrapper or two in the wastebasket beside my desk each week. Last night, in this dim room, while working on my computer and listening to music through earphones, I heard disconcerting rustling noise coming from the wastebasket. I could only assume that a big cockroach had found its way into the discarded cellophane, register receipts and Goya bar wrappers. When I leaned over and tipped the basket to look into it, something big and dark jumped from the basket rim and zoomed past my feet to the shelter of a couch. I assumed that a large cockroach and I had startled each other.
Later, I heard a rustling noise in the kitchen behind me as I sat at desk. I knew it was three empty plastic grocery store bags nested inside each other that I’d left on the floor between the fridge and our pedal-opened trash can. So I set down my earphones to go into the kitchen and grab the bags and throw them outside. As I came past the fridge then picked up the bags, something much larger than a roach scurried from a bag opening to the airspace under the refrigerator. It was too quick and unexpected for me to get a good look, but it seemed like a dark grey mouse, about 2 1/2 inches long with a two-inch tail.
Shortly thereafter, it ran from the fridge to another couch. I opened the front door then got a broom to shoo it toward the great outdoors, but it ran to the other couch, back to the kitchen, and on and on. So I went to bed with the sound of the little rodent scratching somewhere in the kitchen, sniffing for something edible, I suppose.
Today we left the front door open and the screen door ajar so that mighty mouse might escape. And we haven’t seen hide nor hair for hours, so I suppose that it left for a greener pasture. I hadn’t been hospitable; I didn’t feed it, and I’d chased it with a broom. All’s well that ends well.
