Early this morning, my youngest called, “Hey Mom – there’s a mouse in the sink…”
“A bwah…whah?” my sleep-beleguered mind wrestled to comprehend what they were telling me, trying not to snap connection from REM.
“A mouse in the sink.”
“So? Get it out of there.” Feeble attempt to confer authourity.
“I can’t, it’s stuck.”
(Bwahuwah?)
Anyone who knows anything about mice knows that it’s near impossible for a mouse to get stuck in anything because their bones are beyond flexible. (Who’s dreaming, here?)
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I mumbled out to deflect the issue. (Do they know what they’re talking about?) My lucidly languid thought patterning quipped internally.
“It’s in the pipe, behind the grate,” they pressed, clearly wanting my help.
“Leave it alone, I’ll deal with it, later…Let me sleep.”
Maybe the issue would resolve itself. It had made its way there by mysterious mouse magic. Maybe it could find its own way out.
++++
Youngling’s account, in their words:
I heard weird splashing sounds coming from the drain, far-too erratic to be caused by a leaking faucet. Flicking on my phone’s flashlight, I gazed into the depths of the drain to see movement. A cluster of long white things crowded below the drain’s grate. What was that? Had a spider crawled inside? No, they were whiskers, and little rodent feet revealed the mysterious creature to be a mouse. It splashed around in backed-up pipe water, gazing up at me with beady black eyes.
I laughed. How on earth had it gotten there? More importantly, why? What had compelled this little mouse to crawl through our entire drainage system? And just how waterboarded had it gotten, by that point?
I chuckled and tried to wake mom, her half-asleep words calling in a confused tone. “Mouse? Mouse?? In the sink? Which sink? No more, deal with it tomorrow. Sleep.”
I checked back on the mouse to see it hanging from the sink’s grate by its teeth, its little nose peeking out of the drain. It hung there, staring at me. It seemed to be okay sleeping there for the night.
Of course, mom forgot about the mouse, and proceeded to waterboard it more the next morning, before we freed it.
++++
Around 9 am, I got up, used the toilet, and washed my hands, toweling them dry before shambling back to bed for more sleep.
Around 11:30 am, I resigned myself to get up, as I could hear my parents outside loading their caravan, preparing to leave soon.
I used the toilet and washed my hands. Then, I brushed my teeth, spit, flossed, brushed, and rinsed again, finishing with more spitting out any remnants. I dried my mouth, then went back to the sink and rinsed off my face once…twice…three times with the water still running.
I dried my face and curled my bangs, brushed my hair, and went in search of a hair tie to gather my hair with.
++++
2 pm
“Mom…did you get the mouse?”
“What mouse?”
“The one in the sink.”
“What mouse in the sink?”
And my youngest shows me where there’s been a mouse in the bathroom sink, which I now begin fuzzily remembering about – and to my dawning shame and horror, realize that I’ve been waterboarding it!
Thence ensued the following photos of rescuing what turned out to be a newly independent mouseling.
Candid Corvid Productions 