“E-e-e-e-k!”
I ran downstairs to Melody’s apartment when I heard her shrieking. As I burst through the door she was standing on a chair yelling, “Mouse! Mouse! Mouse! E-e-e-e-e!”
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Melody,” I said, as a little field mouse ran under the couch. “It’s just a little mouse.”
“There’s no such thing as just a little mouse,” she said. “You have to get rid of it for me. Mice scare me.”
“Get a trap and set it,” I told her. “When you catch it, call me and I’ll throw the trap in the trash for you.”
A few days later I asked her, “Did you ever set the trap for that mouse?”
“Yes,” she said. “But that has to be the smartest mouse in the world. Every night he steals the cheese and the trap isn’t sprung.”
“Mice aren’t smart,” I told her. “You’re probably not putting the bait on the trap correctly.”
“Whatever,” she said. “Anyway, I’m out of cheese so I’m going to have to use something else.”
The next day she came running upstairs and said, “You have to come help me. I just heard the mousetrap go off under the couch.”
“I’ll take care of it. See, I told you mice aren’t that smart. By the way, what did you use for bait?”
“I was out of cheese,” she said, “so I clipped a picture of a piece of cheese out of a magazine and used the picture for bait. I figured he probably wouldn’t know the difference.”
“Melody, you nitwit,” I said. “You can’t trap a mouse with a picture of a piece of cheese.”
“All I know is that the trap just went off under my couch,” she said. “Will you go check on it?”
I went downstairs and used a stick to pull the mousetrap from under the couch. Caught squarely in the trap was a picture of a mouse.
