There is a mouse in my kitchen.

I know there is because I saw him last night. Or her. I don’t know if it’s a girl mouse or a boy mouse, and I don’t care, all I know is the mouse has got to go.

Several years ago, there was a mouse in my kitchen and I went shopping for a mousetrap. I asked the man at the Ace Hardware what kind to get. He advised me to get one of those glue traps, on account of mice are wily little creatures, able to jimmy the bait out of the snap traps without setting them off, but glue traps are flat and they’ll walk over them and become stuck in them.

I am here to tell you you don’t want a mouse stuck on a glue trap, because what happens after it gets stuck is horrific.

This was all before I got my dog (who is no mouser anyway), and I had put the glue trap out and gone on to bed with a towel stuffed under the door so the mouse couldn’t get to me in my sleep and walk across my face or something silly like that.

At about two in the morning, I heard an awful squealing and flapping coming from the kitchen and went in there to investigate. It was worse than my wildest dreams.

The mouse was stuck there by his two left paws and was jumping around the kitchen trying to free himself. There was blood all over the place because he had already managed to snatch his tail free. It was like the Valentine’s Day Massacre in Miniature in there.

And there I stood in my nightgown, wondering how best to deal with a mostly alive mouse at two in the morning in the dead of winter.

I did not have a bucket to drown him in, nor did I have the heart to beat him to death, and I certainly wasn’t going to call 911 or ask a neighbor for assistance.

What I did know was that I had to deal with it quickly so I could go back to bed and put it all out of my mind.

When I have inscrutable problems like this, I like to go sit on the edge of the couch and fold my hands in my lap, all churchylike, and contemplate my options. I sat there for a few minutes and came up with what seemed, at 2:00 in the morning, like the best plan.

I went back in the kitchen and got a heavy-duty two-gallon Ziploc freezer bag and filled it about 2/3 of the way with water and then I used a plastic spatula and picked it up by the glue and put the whole mess, spatula and all, in the bag and squeezed as much of the air out as I could and sealed it. Then I set it on the front steps to deal with in the morning.

That mouse was mad as hell the last time I saw him alive.

When I went outside the next morning, the bag was no longer on the steps but out in the yard, several feet from where I’d left it.

I later told my brother about The Incident and he was disgusted. With me. He pointed out that my solution was more barbaric than putting the poor thing in a trash bag and smacking him with my shoe or something.

I’d make a terrible killer, because I hate to ruin upholstery or spill things on my shoes. But today I have to go find another mousetrap, and when the man recommends a humane catch-and-release trap (and he will), I’m going to say, “Nosir, I’d like one of those inhumane traps that will snap his little head right off.”