I was lying in bed on a nice, peaceful night, when all of a sudden, at a few inches height, I spotted before me the vilest of vermin. I immediately reached for my whiskey and bourbon.

Staring right at me with black beady eyes was this nasty little creature of the smallest of size.  Now it wasn’t a cockroach, nor was it a tick — those I could handle with merely a stick. This nasty intruder on the floor in my house was none other than a stupid little mouse.

He was sitting on my fan, as innocent as could be, probably looking for food, perhaps cheese or a pea. I was not happy to see this tiny-toothed visitor, so I set forth to exterminate him with his brothers and sisters.

Off the floor went my clothes and spare trash, in went the poison and the peanut-butter-filled traps. My house declared war on our long-tailed house guests and — sure enough — my roommates stood up to the test.

The first mouse ran himself into a corner. The funeral followed with many a mourner. The second varmint met a more comic demise: He was crushed by a saxophone, to everyone’s surprise. With the third mouse’s fate I was particularly pleased, though when I tell this story, stomachs often go queasy.

I found the corpse in a pool of his own brains, and alone in my room, I laughed at his pain. The trap I had set had done the job well. He’d been dead long enough, for his blood started to gel.

To Twitter we went with the hash tag, “#mousewranglers,” and soon all our friends knew the mess that entangled not only our house, but my girlfriend’s, too. After all, I did not want to sleep in a zoo.

I’m not the only one with a severe rodent problem. The bats down in Sadler can cause quite the bedlam. You would think that a school with tuition so high could have dorms free of rodents that fly. Yet as freshmen in school, we were warned of the bats and left to wonder which halls would have rats.

Now a few weeks prior, the bats did infest my girlfriend’s house and they caused quite the mess.  Screaming, she called me late in the night, for the flying mouse wonder gave her a fright. So with tennis rackets wielded, we stormed through the door. My friend brought a drumstick to complete the chore.

The house full of girls still shrieked in sheer panic as if they were passengers aboard the Titanic. Their knees had been bloodied from their swift, panicked crawl, until they were locked in the room down the hall. We searched through the house and checked every room, when another friend came, waving his broom. The bat had since flown away from the manor, leaving us with girls now with poor bedside manner.

Now for weeks I’ve fought against these putrid pests, and many a night I’ve spent without rest.  These suckers must die immediately, I say, for I don’t think I can stand another day with a mouse in my house and close to my bed, scurrying about and close to my head. With a murderous gleam, I’ll continue about until they’re all dead, beyond any doubt.

Brett Fortnam is a senior newspaper journalism and political philosophy major who will be unemployed in nine months. His column appears every Thursday until there are enough complaints to make him stop. He can be reached at bpfortna@syr.edu, but he will not respond.

Published on September 20, 2012 at 3:38 am