You know your life is going well when you rarely use your peripheral vision. That you are living relatively ant, cockroach, spider-free, when you think you might have seen something out of the corner of your eye and you ignore it.
You know you are dealing with intruders when shifts and scurries cause you to snap your neck around, stand up, and reach for the spray, the tissue, or, in our current situation, the empty Balzac’s coffee cup.
Take a minute to consider. What goes in an empty Balzac’s coffee cup?
I’ll give you a hint.
It has four legs, a tail, and your cat doesn’t always bring it to you fully dispatched.
Oh yeah. We gots mice.
Three to be exact. Or rather, we have /had/ three. Kitteh has really stepped up to the plate. When she met her first mouse (a one-off in the other apartment) I had to point it out, and then walk her through it (“this is it champ, this is what you’re here for”).
This time she’s on it. Quick, deadly, efficient. No muss, no fuss, just carcass.
Well, maybe a little fuss.
Kitteh has a routine. Every evening, when she thinks it’s bedtime, she brings us one of her toys. It’s adorable. Because she talks to us the whole way, but it’s all muffled because she has something in her mouth. So it sounds something like: “Meowlf? Meowlf? Meowlf?”
Making it clear that the “toy” label is strictly a human thing, she recently walked down the hallway to my office making this adorable little noise (“Meowlf?”) … and carrying something that was less “toy” and more “still-struggling-for-freedom-small-animal”.
I pep-talked her through the final kill. Then popped it into the aforementioned empty Balzac’s coffee cup and took it to the trash.
By sheer coincidence, I have happened to have empty paper coffee cups around the house when dead mice are presented to me. This is unusual, since I pretty much always bring a mug. But sometimes…
Husband and I dropped by Balzac’s on the weekend. And I joked that it was bad mojo to keep the empty cups in the house, because empty cups are mice omens.
This morning I was walking out of my office when, out of the corner of my eye, I thought I saw a piece of string sticking out from under my chair. By the time I got to the kitchen the other empty coffee cup had dropped, and I realized what it most likely actually was.
I got back, and confirmed that the bit of string sticking out from under the chair was, in fact, a bit of string that was actually a tail, attached to the rigid little body of a rigid little dead mouse that had been neatly tucked under the chair. Kitteh had brought me a present. Gift-wrapped in the chairskirt.
I called Husband, who laughed over how lucky I am to be the cat’s favourite. He also pointed out that we had not in fact taken the recycling out on Sunday, and that if I looked, there was an empty Balzac’s coffee cup in there.
I hate it when I’m right.
What I’m most concerned about now, is that the barrista double-cupped Husband’s drink. So what we actually had in our recycling bin was two empty coffee cups, though only one lid.
Having kicked back with “Live and Let Die” last night, I can’t help but feel that this is a gruesome gruesome foreshadowing of something else I’m going to find. If a cup+lid signifies a whole mouse, a cup alone signifies… *shudder*