Tenth mouse

We were watching a movie when the mousetrap went off, at the same time that Nate's phone started to ring. After three days of re-setting and re-baiting the trap, I finally felt victory and ran into the kitchen to assess the size and worthiness of my elusive nemesis. But it didn't kill the mouse all the way. I'll spare you the grotesque details of the mouse's situation, but all of a sudden I felt myself start to panic. "It's not dead!" I whispered in a hiss to Nate who was in the living room on the phone with his sister. He didn't drop the phone and come sprinting into the kitchen to bring the mouse some kind of instantaneous, painless death like what I had seen play out in my mind, and I looked back down at it with both my hands held out with my fingers splayed as if I were going to solve the situation by casting a spell. Little, grey, fuzzy. Something that looks like a pet with its black little eyes in a sawdust-bottomed aquarium with little kids tapping on the glass. And I had violently surprised it into facing its own death.

A few seconds later the mouse died and I dropped it along with the trap into the trash. Nate hung up the phone and I sat back on the couch to finish the movie. And I shed a few tears over the little death. This is the tenth mouse I have killed in this apartment, and the only one that has bothered me.