The Mouse

I live in a dump. I remember about a year ago I found a dead mouse in the hallway in my apartment. I was talking with my mom on the phone at the time, and I remember telling her as I stared at the dead animal what I was seeing. Soon after I hanged up the phone, I picked up the rodent with a paper towel and dumped it. Some time thereafter, I thought I saw a mouse running in my bedroom. This caused me to panic and spend the next several nights sleeping on the living room pull-out bed. For a long time after that I never saw that second mouse again, and I began to think maybe it was just my hair brushing against my eye, and all I really saw was a moving black object, so maybe it was just the hair getting in my eye.

Then about a month ago I again saw the mouse in the kitchen. This time I was sure it was a mouse, no doubt about it. My aunt Marina was visiting us at the time and I told her what I saw - the mouse running under the stove - and she said something along the lines of Kakaya problema, eto zhe myshka, ne koshka, which translates to: "What's the problem? It's a mouse, not a cat." I did not fully understand why having a cat running around the house would be worse than having a mouse since the cat would have fewer places to hide. Then again, it might be harder to get rid of the cat if it runs around a lot. Our mouse is really small - you can probably step on it to kill it or as my mom suggested, place it in a bag and close it to suffocate the animal. I thought this method to be particularly cruel, even worse than stepping on the mouse, probably because the latter strategy would kill the animal right away.

The mouse made more appearances over the last month in the kitchen, the living room and the hallway by the bathroom. My mom checked for possible holes in our wall, although we didn't find anything. We live in a concrete high-rise circa 1969 - where would these holes come from? We pulled back the living room couch to check for holes in the wall. We saw two holes in the back of the couch but they didn't come from the mouse. They appeared because the springs in the couch busted through it, probably after my cousin Andrew jumped up and down on it. We've had that couch since January 1998, which is when we moved into this dump. My mom said that 7 and a half years is too short a lifespan for furniture - couches should last for a decade. We'll have to dump it when my brother visits next month.

The mouse has caused minimal damage - she's eaten some of our red potatoes that we store under the sink. Earlier this evening I saw it appear from under the refrigerator and then come back. My mom and I pulled out the fridge but saw just emptiness. I wonder if we had killed it by rolling the fridge over it. We rolled it back and didn't see the mouse on the other side either. "Maybe we're rolling the refrigerator along with the mouse," my mom said. Or maybe the mouse escaped while we were busy moving the fridge and not looking at the floor.

"Maybe we'll open the door to the balcony and she'll run away. No, she's not that stupid," my mom just said. Soon we might not need to worry about the mouse at all. We're supposedly in the running for one of the affordable condos in the new Mill River House building, which is now under construction on West Broad Street in Stamford. My mom has to go to a meeting on September 6th where they will review our eligibility. You don't have to be poor to be eligible for affordable housing in Fairfield County given today's real-estate prices.

Will we get the condo? Probably not. There are several hundred applicants for only about 15 units. Even if you consider many of them have bad credit histories, it's still a long shot for us. There's also a certain problem with that building. For one thing it's located just west of downtown next to what might be considered a bad neighborhood, though Stamford is generally a safe city and I've never been very afraid of anyone here. Certainly it's not a concern for many people since they've been able to sell the market-priced units for $390,000. The real problem is the west wall of the building faces a gas station, and my mom and I have a hunch that's where they're putting the affordable units. Below is a photo that I took on July 4th. If we move to Mill River House, will those be our windows?
Right now from our windows and from our 12th-floor balcony we have sweeping views of the west side of Stamford, of South End, of Long Island Sound and on a clear day, even Long Island, New York. But we have a mouse in the house. If we move to Mill River House, we won't have any rodents (at least to begin with) but we'll have gas-station views. Also, we'll be homeowners, which will be really cool. My mom has already told me she probably won't accept the condo if the windows go out onto the Getty. At the very least, we'll be able to check the price of gas simply by looking out the window. We can see I-95 from our current apartment and can check traffic conditions before heading out on the road. For some reason that seems more useful than being able to check gas prices before filling up. Then again, this might be our only chance for a while to own property in a part of Stamford we actually want to be in.