A Mouse's Trap: Ramblings of a Domesticated Rodent

A Hole New Beginning

The new hole rendered the room an entirely different view. I had to find my way again. New scents—citrus and mint—made it even harder for me to retrace my tracks. I made new ones, wary that there would still be booby traps on my old trail.

The human was smarter than we thought. Or maybe my cousins were just stupid. Mice can be stupid that way, giving in to urge rather than to reason. I have been raised well enough to know that I have to earn my meal. A piece of cheese doesn't just happen to stick out of nowhere. If life were that easy, then it's not life at all, it's quite the opposite actually and I have seen my relatives' insides splattered on walls because of this. And the cheese? It became the sole witness to the gruesome event. Another thing I hate about my breed is that, more often than not, we never learn.

That is probably why I found myself inside the human's room again. Uncle always reminded me that humans are the enemy. The curse of the middle-class mice. Rats in the ghetto have to watch out for cats, while we in the suburbs have a bigger enemy. I would've preferred cats myself because they're stupid. But humans are the thinking kind. Weaponry is essential in their home. BB guns, traps, glue, poison, flip flops, and basically anything they can get their hands on. No wonder our kind jumps with a mere snap of human fingers. But like I said, while humans are smart, it does not help us a bit that we are stupid. We smell cheese and we abandon all fear.

Forgive me if I speak lowly of my kind. I feel that I am above them. I'm educated and I found a way to control my urge. Every time I cruise the human's territory, I stick soap crumbs up my nose to sanitize whatever seductive smell that dares to entice my animal instincts.

The human had every right to abduct my cousins anyway. I told them to take only what is due to us. Anything outside the bin was off limits. I knew that if we stuck with this, we would have had an unwritten understanding with the human. He might have gladly watched us feast on delicious green bread if we only followed the rules.

But my cousins were arrogant, uneducated, rat-bred monsters. They ate packed food, they left feces everywhere, and worse, they disturbed the human while he slept. That probably did it for him. I too would be annoyed if some ant decided to run up and down my tail.

The last time I saw my cousins, they were stuck on a piece of cardboard, trying to claw their way out of glue. They were shouting apologies to the human and while he heard, he didn't listen.

I hate to admit it, but now, I'm glad that my cousins are out of the way. I have a new hole and I am the only one who can enter the human's room. To be honest, the reason why I am here is not because of food. If I may be direct without being accused of being a hamster, I have a certain admiration for the human. I feel that we have a lot in common.

We both love to read. I'm no bookworm, but reading Nutrition Information excites me the way paperbacks excite the human. We both love films. Art house films to be exact. None of those crap that Mickey and Jerry star in, but films that depict rodent life truthfully. Flushed Away remains to be my favorite, it's so accurate I almost thought it was a documentary.

We also both love to eat. Needless to say, mice are walking digestive systems. It is our luck that humans have larger egos than stomachs. More often than not, they buy too much food that end up in the bin. They think they're hungry, but what they're really hungry for is attention.

And that's another thing that I have in common with the human. We're both lonely. We're lonely because our hunger for attention is never fed. There is no one to watch a movie with; share a bag of chips with; and at the end of the day you sleep alone and the pillow does not hug you back.

This new hole is a new beginning for me. I hope to introduce myself to the human. And to do that, I must first establish trust and understanding. I have to respect the limitations and take care of the room as if it were my own pad. It's possible to be friends with humans. My mother knows that, too. Why else would she name me Ben?