Tag Archives: mouse droppings in food

Mouse Problems

Mouse on a table
A mouse, with mouse pellets, on a kitchen table.
(Artwork by Sharon Davis. Contact us for her contact info.)

I tried to tell my roommate that I thought we had mouse problems, but typical of her, she never listens to me.

I’d noticed some tell-tale signs a few weeks ago.  I was vacuuming our tiny living room (I always do the vacuuming), and saw some tiny little black pellets up against the baseboards.  I bent down to look at them more closely and realized they must be mouse droppings.  So glad I bent down to look at them instead of picking them up!  I vacuumed them up and then scouted the kitchen for more mouse droppings.  I found a few under the sink, by the garbage, but didn’t find an actual mouse.

I told my roommie about it, but she just laughed it off, saying I was making a bigger deal of it than it really was.  It was probably just one single mouse that had come in to investigate the apartment but was long gone.  She even suggested I’d made the whole thing up just to try to get her to help clean up.  I shrugged it off.

But, I soon began to realize our mouse problem was bigger than that.  I kept an eye out for a mouse or some sign that we had one or more in the apartment, just to be on the safe side.  When I found my cereal box had been chewed through, I tossed it out and put all my stuff in plastic containers.  My roommate and her boyfriend made fun of me, calling me obsessive-compulsive.  I cleaned my room thoroughly, not wanting anything to jump out at me from under a pile of clothes or anything.  Of course, my roommate’s a lot less clean than I am, and I tried not to think of all the many places a mouse could be hiding in her room.

I had a bunch of friends over one night so we could all watch the game.  My roommate and her boyfriend were being overly-cuddly on one couch, right in front of everyone, and talking loudly about how stupid I was to be afraid of one little mouse that wasn’t even in our apartment anymore.  The rest of us tried to ignore them as best we could, and just enjoyed the game and ate the chicken wings I’d made for all of us.  She bragged about all the “real” junk food they had, and pulled out a big bag of cheese-dusted snacks, which they kept all to themselves.

They sat there and loudly ate the entire bag, until they reached the bottom.  Then, they got quiet.  There was a little chewed hole at the bottom of the bag, and a couple of tiny little mouse pellets that were now all dusted with fake cheese.

I think, finally, she believed we had a mouse problem, and it was time to do something about it.