In my old apartment at 43rd and Spruce, the spackle crumbled, the refrigerator’s cold purr sputtered to a stop, and the wires twisting out of the walls sparked when I walked by. When the new refrigerator arrived, my landlord neglected to take the old one out, so I draped damp clothing on it—damp only because my shirts and pants had been rejected, despite countless quarters, by the inferior laundromat dryers two blocks away.

The hard-partying woman downstairs—who always emerged from a cloud of pot smoke when she opened her door—moved out, and the smoke detector, sensing abandonment, bleated endlessly until I broke into the empty roach-infested apartment and tore out its battery. 

On the bright side, there was a mouse in my stove.

I always like having animals around me, even if they’re potentially disease-ridden. This mouse was gray and fat, thanks to my leftovers, yet sprightly enough to avoid my neighbor’s cat, who’d regularly come into my apartment and sit for hours, tail swishing, by the oven.

Before the mouse and I could truly bond, I had to move out. There’s only so long you can live in a dump like that—or at least that’s what my mother told me.

Moving day must have confused my rodent friend, who was usually quick to disappear when danger was nigh. After my final check to see that I’d left the apartment in its original condition—as a decaying crap hole—I went to say goodbye to the cat. He was playing with something in the bathroom, and backed away when I came near. The mouse’s head rolled like a fat little marble away from his mouth.

I was fascinated. I stared at it for a while, trying to absorb its small shocked face, then I picked it up and tossed it into the toilet. The cat jumped up and watched it swirl away.

Goodbye, cruel world!

My detachment in such a situation wasn’t unfamiliar. When one of my finches died, I palpated her dead body to determine the cause of death. After I realized she didn’t have an egg stuck in her (a frequent killer in the finch world), I continued to examine her anyway. How often do you get a chance to really feel a bird-the delicate architecture of its wings, the soft ripple of its tiny gray feathers?

I like to think I was being scientific and poetic rather than behaving like a serial killer, but my detachment gave me pause. I’d been positively undone by my cat’s death, but animals smaller than a datebook were apparently expendable.

When Little Gray Mouse, my pet, got sick, I knew what had to be done. She’d been such a good mother when she had her litter of five-nursing them and cleaning them even though they were unsightly clots of misshapen flesh. But now her fur and one layer of her skin was peeling away. I could see her musculature as though she were a model in a biology class.

My boyfriend Vince claimed that the fact that she breathed in and out and ran back and forth when poked meant the loss of a layer of her body wasn’t a big deal. Yes, she was slowly disappearing, but look how she nibbled that piece of popcorn. What a lust for life!

I should point out here that Vince is an avid fisherman, hasn’t owned a pet in a decade, and finds the fetishization of the domestic animal in the face of world poverty revolting. Now he’d become so attached to Little Gray Mouse he couldn’t mention her sickness without saying dismally, “Let’s not talk about it.”

But when she started sleeping on the edge of her water dish as though she were contemplating drowning herself, he gave in: We had to end it.

But how?

The one place that actually takes mice seriously (Queen Village Animal Hospital, in case you adopt a mouse instead of glue-trapping it) wasn’t taking new “clients.”

So I called a friend who’s been involved in pro-rodent activities for years. She verified that flushing the mouse would be inhumane—a terrible gasping, gulping way to go. I couldn’t imagine drowning Little Gray Mouse, with her expressive red eyes like miniature maraschino cherries, and her love of popcorn and goat cheese.

I told Vince I wanted to drop a brick on her instead. He was furious. 

“On Little Gray Mouse?” he said, emphasizing her name—which, let’s face it, isn’t even a name.

One day, after we’d had a fight, I stomped around the apartment looking for something to kill her with. Why not make my anger productive? We didn’t have bricks or cinderblocks or even ornamental stones. But we had books. Many.

We’re drowning in books—bookshelves tilting and sagging with their weight; stuffed in sidewise and lengthwise. We have so many books, we’ve got a policy: No more new books unless we get rid of old ones, like the discards rule in gin rummy.

Vince grabbed a pile while I found a Gap bag to put LGM in. (It seemed more dignified than the thin wisps of plastic you get at Fresh Grocer.) I placed her inside. Vince stood over her with Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking, Mario Batali Simple Italian Food and something about Jewish-Italian homicide—I mean cooking. Then he dropped them.

We froze. Vince dropped them again, just to be sure.

Boom.

“Don’t look in the bag!” Vince warned.

I looked.

Poor Little Gray Mouse. Her body didn’t look too damaged, but her cute little eyes had popped out of her head, making her look like a scary Halloween costume.

I folded the bag over her, cradled her still-warm body, and wept … wait, that’s what a normal person would’ve done.

I tossed her in the trash and threw out her toys.

Now we’ve got just two mice left—Little Black-and-White Mouse and Little Gray-and-White Mouse. We’ve had Little Gray-and-White since she was born. She’s got a very distinctive mouseanality. It’ll be hard to murder her when the time comes, but it gives me an excuse to buy more books. Tools of the trade, you know?