Week 8 Prompts (catching up)

31. Eeenie, meenie, minie, moe, catch a rabbit by the toe....

There was some sort of ruckus in the kitchen. Brad sounded both excited and disturbed, and the kids shouting. It's always something. As I enter the kitchen I discover what warranted such a reaction; a mouse. It's so small I didn't notice it right away, until it darted towards the dish rack at the back corner of the counter. Brad is standing right there, at the edge of the counter, glaring at the mouse, or at least the general vicinity in which it ran to.
"Catch it!" I chide him.
"What? No. You catch it. What if it bites me?" he asks, looking genuinely concerned about the possibility.
"Jesus, babe. Just put something over there at the stove so he cant run along the wall, I'll get him out from the dish rack. Then you grab him."
The kids were jumping and chattering, like some sort of horribly unplanned cheering number. Brad and I, almost in unison, tell them both to go to the living-room. Brad looks around for a moment, and settles on a tupperware lid. He puts it up against the wall at the back of the stove, and I begin poking around and moving dishes out of the rack.
*Beep Beep Beep* The tiny mouse took off like the damn Roadrunner bird, attempting to escape my prying hand in between the dishes. For me, it seemed to be happening in slow motion. I saw the mouse dart towards Brad, as he looks at me and I yell for him to grab the damned thing.
But, he doesn't. Instead, he does nothing except this little "oh, oh OH!" noise as the mouse came to the tupperware lid, at which point it changed its mind and heads back to the dish rack. Brad looked relieved.
"Seriously? Babe. You could have just grabbed him."
Obviously that wasn't going to happen, so it was up to me. The only route the mouse could take was the same one he had just tried, so I started moving more dishes and poking around in between them again, and out he came making a run towards the tupperware lid again. Brad still did nothing, so I put my hand down in front of the mouse. It was startled and tried to turn and retreat again, but I closed my hand over it.
As I pulled my hand up from the stove, I opened my fingers to check that the mouse was okay. It was too cute. I always had a soft spot for little critters, and this one was itty-bitty. It had shiny sable fur, two huge black eyes, and bunches of twitchy white whiskers. Admittedly, I was having one of those Awe! moments.
"See Babe, he's just a tiny little thing. He couldn't hurt anyone if he tried," I said while lifting my hand towards Brad to show him.
He had that reluctant, I don't believe you look on his face. Clearly I needed to explain in better terms.
"He's too small to bite you. See how tiny his mouth is? He can't bite any of us. Except maybe between the fingers. Take him."
I handed the mouse to Brad, and the reluctant look finally disappeared, and was now being replaced with that same Awe! look. Mission complete. Perpetrator has been apprehended, and will be dealt with accordingly. Brad hands it back to me, and after allowing the kids to look at it closely and say goodbye, I usher it out the back door. I almost felt bad as cold as the nights are, but I realize that it will likely be right back inside somehow anyway. He'll be back for round two.
As I walk out of the kitchen, I turn to Brad and say, "Next time I tell you to grab the damn mouse, just grab it, okay?"



33. "We are gathered here today to remember....."
In the backyard of a small house, on a dead end street in a small town, in an even smaller state, there is a pet cemetery. I know, because I created it.
We lived in that house about 4 years, and over the course of those years I took in many a wild creature needing care. We had pets; 2 cats that consistently produced more than half a dozen kittens at a time, but taking in injured wildlife interested me more. I felt like I was doing something good for the world, at least on a very small scale. But, as I learned back then, not everything can be saved. Sometimes, despite every effort, things die. And so began the backyard cemetery.
I had already saved a handful of critters before my first failure.The first to be buried was a snake. Just your average garter variety. I was pretty sure of two things when I found him. My cat had done the damage, and he wasn't going to make it. He lasted a few days, but then he was gone. Mom was never thrilled with my hobby, but accepted that I needed a place to dispose of the not-so-fortunate. So, she granted me the back corner of the yard by the woods. The snake got a shoe box and a short service, topped off with a small grave marker I used my wood-burning hand-tool to create.
After the snake, 3 birds, 4 mice, another snake, a squirrel and a young raccoon joined the cemetery. My successes still outnumbered the losses, and I still felt good about my hobby. I was always a bit sad and disappointed when one of the creatures I was trying to save didn't make it, but I understood that it was just a part of life, and most of them had unfortunately been on the lower end of the food chain and that had been the cause of their injuries.
All the while that I was playing amateur vet-tech, our pet cats kept having more and more kittens. We didn't have much trouble finding them homes, but obviously each batch was with us for several weeks before leaving. In mid-july of the last year we lived at that house, we had a batch of 7 newborn kittens only 3 weeks old. We had a habit of naming each, even though they wouldn't be with us long.
Lacie, the Queen (mother cat) had taken up residence in my mothers bedroom as it was the most quiet and unused room of the house (mom worked long hours so her room was usually empty except at bedtime). One evening I was woken by a nightmare and stumbled through the hallway into my moms room needing to be comforted (this usually meant laying on the floor by her bed while she rubbed my back with an arm dangling off her bed until I went back to sleep).
It was dark and I was half awake, not thinking about anything but my nightmare. As I took a few steps into her room, my final step landed on something soft and squishy. I stepped back in shock, but it was too late. Mom heard me cry out, and she turned on her bedside lamp to find me kneeling on the floor, cradling and kitten in my arms. The soft and squishy I stepped on had been #5, Binx. Lacie was circling me, eyeing me suspiciously and yowling, the other kittens were crying out as she had left them to come inspect me and Binx.
As I knelt there with Lacie yowling at me and mom talking, I didn't hear anything. My whole attention was focused on Binx. He was limp in my hands, and as I lifted him to my face too examine him closer, his little head swayed back and forth unnaturally. He was breathing, but it was raspy and labored. I knew this was more than anything I could help with like the other animals I had taken in. And what was worse, I knew I had been the one to do the damage.
We rushed out to the car and drove 15 minutes to the vets, mom had called ahead to make sure Hussey would be there to meet us. I didn't like Hussey. He had a very small practice, and the policy of putting down any animal that came in, regardless of its health, if it didn't get homed within a month. But he was the only vet near us. We arrived, and Hussey met as at the front door of the building, looking pretty disgruntled. I had tears streaming down my face and was dabbing Binx' nose with a tissue as it had started bleeding on the drive over.
Of course Hussey would have nothing to offer us but a needle. We need to put it out of it's misery he said. He told us he could take Binx, put him down and dispose of him for us. I simply couldn't stand for such a thing. I knew there was nothing to be done for Binx, but refused to let him be disposed of by this monstrosity that calls himself a vet.
I held Binx while Hussey gave him the lethal injection. I felt his breathing slow, and the last bit of life leave his body. And then I took him home and laid him to rest in the backyard cemetery. It didn't matter that it was 4am, this was my fault and I needed to do it right. I dug his grave at the front of the cemetery, and put him in a shoe box with a blanket and a little fish-shaped cat toy. I spent the entire morning sitting out there, in the backyard, surrounding his grave with stones and later that day I made him a proper marker with his name and dates and a little drawing of a cat I burned into the wood.
RIP Binx

         .         
         \`-"'"-'/
          } 6 6 {    
         =.  Y  ,=   
           /^^^\  .
          /     \  )           
         (  )-(  )/ 
          ""   ""