The following story is true; the dates have been changed to protect the lazy.

Last night, I heard a sound for the first time, although I still somehow recognized it instantly. I was sitting at my computer working and I heard my wife scream from the living room. Mind you, I’ve known her for a lot longer than I’ve been married to her, and I feel like I’ve heard her shriek more than once in that time…but this one was special.

Someone once said “before you get married, make sure one of you kills bugs.” Usually I just scoot them outside on a scrap of paper or something — assuming we get to it before one of our cats does.1 This didn’t sound anything like that.2

This time, once my loving wife fetched me, I found a mouse laying in the middle of the living room. Before you get any ideas, I’m not talking about the little plastic numbers with glued-on fur and felt ears and tail. I’m talking a real mouse capable of real bleeding. Oh, and it was bleeding. Fortunately (or is that unfortunately), none of our cats spent enough time feral to know why they can render a mouse into this state so easily.3

The answers to the two questions I remember her asking were both yes. Any guesses? “Do you want a glove?” and “Is he still alive?” — he wasn’t still there the next morning, so either he was playing dead to get the cat to lose interest or something else happened along to finish the job. Welcome to married life, I guess.

  1. Anyone with a cat will tell you it’s scientifically impossible for you to notice the bug before the cat does, even if you and the bug are awake in one room and the cat is asleep in another room all the way across the house [↩]
  2. If I recall correctly, that event sounds exactly like my wife walking into whatever room I’m in with a sort of tense look on her face [↩]
  3. I swear I am not making this up; the most underweight of our cats has been stealing food from the most overweight of our cats, even though the latter is fed separately. I’ve heard of cats preferring one food over another, but the by-prescription-only weight-loss cat food? [↩]

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