I'm Dirty

I cleaned my apartment today. I hadn't done that in an embarrassingly long time. Really, if you'd seen my apartment you would have been like, "Miranda, I know your brother just died and everything, but this is fucking nasty."

First, I unearthed my couch. It had been buried beneath a mountain of fossilized clothing and it was nice to see it again. Then I started sweeping. My year old cat, Turk, loves nothing more than tearing apart pieces of cardboard, so the entire floor was covered in cardboard snow. I swept it all up, stuck the broom under the couch to half-assedly get the dust out from under it, and pulled out a dirty tangle of rubber bands, delivery menus, underwear, cat hair, and almost-dried-up pens. I also found a lighter I lost 5? 6? months ago. And then, like a chill through my body, a great wave of stink filled the room. It was really bad. Musky, sweet, and a little cheesy, like a sweaty sock dipped in Alfredo sauce and left to rot. Fucking disgusting.

I examined the dirt pile, but there wasn't anything that horrendous. I poked under the couch some more. Nothing. I wondered for a moment if I could just pretend I didn't notice it and let it go away, and it's a testament to how bad the smell was that I overcame my laziness and moved the sofa aside. Turk and Bean - our older, wiser, fatter cat - ran into the room, tails bushy, eyes wide with feral lust. They found the source before I did.

A dead mouse.

A motherfucking dead mouse.

A dead and rotting mouse underneath my couch.

Those of you who don't live in New York may be thinking, "Well, of course! You're living in filth in a cheap New York City apartment, what did you expect?" But those of you who reside in Gulliani's sparkling and cheerful Manhattan know that there's a lot fewer mice and bugs than you'd think. Especially in a fifth floor walk up. We haven't seen a mouse here in two years.

In fact, I've lived in this city for eight years now, in eight different apartments in three boroughs, and I've only had one other dead mouse incident.

It was in the Bronx, where I was living with my boyfriend at the time and a small, short-lived, black and white cat named Boops. We woke up one morning to find our painted wood floors land-mined with three dead mice. We suspected it was Boops' work, but the mice looked untouched. No blood, no innards - it was a like a little family of People's Temple mice had moved in and drank their little cups of Kool Aid in our living room.

We'd never seen a mouse in our apartment before. I cleaned them up. An hour later, I found a fourth dead mouse in the office. It was baffling. Boops was a tiny cat, sickly, she died of natural causes after two years. Though she was the obvious suspect, we couldn't quite bring ourselves to believe she could so effectively and systematically kill anything.

And then, as we sat on the couch later that evening, Boops began a slow gallop from one corner of the bedroom to the other, across the living room, and into the kitchen. This wasn't unusual. We didn't look up until she passed us, flung her head back, and opened her mouth to let something fly up, up, up into a high arc, brushing the cheap light fixture and hanging there silhouetted for a second before falling, hurtling down, slamming first into the wall and then the floor.

It was a mouse. Dead, now.

We never saw a mouse in that apartment again.

The stinky couch mouse is my first mouse since. I don't know what happened to it, if there were tooth marks on it or what. I just threw it away, opened the window, and got the 409.

It was weird how we couldn't smell it until I started sweeping under there. Encased in trash, it was like it had it's own little mouse tomb, where it could decompose without bothering the neighbors.

I'm going to try to keep my apartment cleaner from now on.

Also under the couch were a surprising number of Turk's toys. Turk likes to play fetch with plastic milk and water bottle caps. We throw them, he chases them and brings them back over and over until he invariably loses them under the couch. Then we give him new ones. He has amassed 32 so far. Here he is, with his bounty:


GTD from ***7441542:
you got some nerve gettin that girl pregnant and i can't believe that u said that ashley wasnt going to be there 4 u. miranda