Adam Oster, Novelist

A few weeks ago, while I was taking care of some, um, business in the bathroom, an adorable little mouse came running into the room, saw me, fell over himself as he tried to change his trajectory, and bolted back out of the room. Since that moment, my cats have been going nuts over trying to catch this little guy who has been hiding in my house from the severe cold outside.

This means that in the middle of the night, I’ve been awoken numerous times to the cats quite literally playing with this mouse as it runs around my bedroom trying to find a way away from the vicious killers. There was a day that it was hiding under the refrigerator and the cats refused to leave the kitchen for a twelve hour period. One even hid in the sink for a while, presumably hoping to fool the mouse into thinking it was okay to come out.

I’m pretty confident that most of the time this mouse has been alive in my house hasn’t been due to my cats’ inability to catch the dang thing (made all the more apparent by me being awoken one night to find one of them pushing it from paw to paw like some sort of weird game). No, they were playing with it. A new playmate had entered the house. And playtime always happened around 2am.

The cats, however, must have finally tired of their plaything, because as I was getting ready for the day this morning, I came across a tiny little corpse laid out on the carpet in front of my dresser, completely disemboweled.

Like, this was horror movie-style disembowelment. This little creature was stretched out over twice his actual length because of how the cats decided to put him on display.

My cats are sociopaths.

Which, I guess, is probably true of all cats, right?

But it’s definitely not the kind of scene I wanted to find as I was waking up this morning.

It makes me think the mouse trap would have been the humane option here, instead of that poor little mouse living out its last minutes running from room to room after he finds out that the phone call was coming from inside the house.

Poor little guy.

But, at least my sleep should be able to get back to normal, right? That doesn’t make ME the sociopath, does it?