If you at all follow me on social media, you'll know that my cat caught a mouse this morning. I am using the term caught very loosely here.
We have three cats: Rey, the semi-feral scavenger who I found trying to eat my squirrels, Mooch, who is 18lbs of belligerence and Norman Bates like love for me, and my husband's cat, Gia. Gia became my husband's cat around the time my daughter was born and she decided I was The Worst because I made such a sad, defective kitten, whom she also dearly loves. Her heart is in the right place, but she pretty much fails at being a cat.
Mooch is generally the one I take seriously when I hear the "I have something!" miaow. He is like a medieval warlord. The last time he caught a mouse, he paraded it upstairs, barely alive, and it was all "MUMMA! I have catched you this tribute and his death shall be at your pleasure!" *crunch* "See? I lay his freshly dead corpse at your feets. Now pet the catfat, for I am a glorious hero!"
The last thing Gia caught was either a sock or a chicken nugget, so when she made the OMG! I caught a thing! miaow, I ignored her. Cat who cried wolf principle. So, of course, by the time I realise she has not-a-sock, she's already on the bed.
There are at least 400 things that bother Gia. She is quirky—really quirky. For instance, she fervently hates grass and the outdoors. She managed to get out once and spent every single minute it desperately trying to get back in, as my squirrels sat about two feet away, probably laughing at her.
So, as I'm trying to move to grab her, Wee Mousie wiggles and Gia gets this look of confused terror on her face and drops the very much alive mouse ON MY BED and for a second, none of us moves. Then, all hell breaks loose. Wee Mousie skitters for its life, I am simultaneously trying to get out of bed without killing myself, keep the other two apex predators and Beastie out of my root, and get the LIVE FRAKKING MOUSE out of my bed because I don't keep mouse-catching supplies bedside on the regular, and Gia is looking at me blankly because SOMETHING IS GOING ON.
While I'm directing Beastie to get me some kind of container and, no, I don't care what kind, just get something!, Gia's cat instinct sputters to life once more and she decides to have a second go at catching Wee Mousie. It lasts approximately 7 seconds until Wee Mousie wriggles again and she drops it—again—and looks at me like "Well, now what? Because I am not catching that thing. Ew. Get one of the other cats or something."
My other two cats have decided, by this point, that it's just another instance of Gia being Gia and vanished, my child has gotten lost somewhere, and I have a teeny, panicky mouse still IN MY BED. So, I opted for the dumbest possible course of action: I grabbed the mouse.
Actually, first I asked Wee Mousie very nicely to please not bite me if it wanted to live, then I grabbed the back of its neck like I vaguely remember picking up belligerent hamsters as a child and hustled it into my wastebin, where it looked at me with its wee mousie eyes. As I'm bringing the mousebin into my bathroom, everyone suddenly reappears, desperately interested in what I'm doing now. Thanks for the help, you guys.
And the first thing my daughter says when she sees it? "We're keeping it, right? If you feed it, we're keeping." Because, of course.
Meanwhile, many hours later, Gia is STILL in my room trying to figure out what happened to the mouse.
