Michael Harding: ‘I wrapped the tiny body in a page from the Leitrim Observer’

Once upon a time there was a mouse who lived in the attic and loved apples. I knew this because I kept feeding him apples. It’s not that I wanted to fatten him. In fact I wanted to kill him. And I thought he might be seduced into a mouse trap.

The only reason I knew he was in the attic was because one night he came down through the chimney which is no longer used, and onto the worktop where he found a red apple I had left on a plate.

I have a passion for apples when I wake, and if I get up to the toilet at first light I often go to the kitchen and sit munching an apple as morning light bleeds through the drizzle outside.

It is then that I think about the shortness of life, and how a man of my age must withdraw from the world before he is dragged away from it without dignity, by sudden death or illness.

But when I found holes in the apple where the mouse had been nibbling I was not very happy. Later that day I bought two traps in the Farmer’s Store in Drumshanbo. One for the worktop. And one for the hot press.

And that evening I lodged morsels of apple on the trap where the mouse would dine later in the night.

Outsmarted

I slept until about 6am, when I rose as usual for a trip to the bathroom and then to the kitchen. To my dismay the trap was empty.

“Ye little bastard,” I whispered when I saw that he had eaten the bait without causing the trap to slap down on his neck. He did the same in the hot press. The apple was gone. The mouse was free. And I was enraged.

On the second night I did the same. And on the second morning the mouse had outsmarted me again.

But on the third night I couldn’t sleep. I began thinking more about the mouse. After all, he was a sentient being. I imagined him up in the attic, foostering around with his lady wife, and all his little babies. I imagined him in a mouse armchair reading the paper with mouse spectacles, and looking at a little mouse clock on the wall.

“I’m just going out for a stroll,” he says to the wife, “I won’t be long.”

“Be careful,” she replies, tucking her little babies into the felt insulation that covers the attic floor. “You know it’s dangerous down there where the humans are.”

“Oh, don’t worry,” he mutters. “The old fellow downstairs is harmless. He leaves me apples for supper.”

And maybe some night he might take a piece of apple back to the attic, and she might glow with gratitude. “Just a little gift for you and the kids,” he might say.

I fell asleep but woke after an hour in a state of distress. I should go to the kitchen and disarm the trap, I thought. But I was too tired. So I left it until morning.

Without dignity

I had developed a relationship with the mouse, which indicates how sentimental I am. I was ignoring what my guru once told me, about a monk in Canada who refused to use a mouse trap in his Toronto apartment, even though he could hear things scratching behind the walls. After a few years he had an infestation and instead of one mouse dying he was forced to sanction the extermination of many hundreds.

The next morning I went to the kitchen, intent on throwing out the traps, but there on top of the worktop was the mouse, his neck severed by the metal spring and a thread of dark congealed blood marking a trail from the trap onto the worktop.

I sat for a while in the dark, watching the dawn come again through the mist outside.

I wondered if the mouse felt death like a human. He certainly died completely. His mouseness had been extinguished. As is humanity extinguished in a human death.

The mouse may not have considered the preciousness of life, before death dragged him away without dignity, but for a moment as I stared at the trap I felt again that mixture of sorrow and serenity we sometimes feel when we gaze upon the dead.

I wrapped him in a page from the Leitrim Observer and disposed of the remains outside. I washed my hands and made a mug of tea and thought again about the shortness of life, and the importance of withdrawing from the world,  before one is dragged away from it unexpectedly, and without dignity.