tufts of gray fur were scattered across the small, white pad. hair from the unswept floor gathered on the edges along with feces from a panicked and hysterical rodent. the struggle had only imprisoned him more and caused him to defecate all over the adhesive.

crosstrife ate Corn Pops® from a swivel chair at his kitchen counter. the same counter where he studied, paid bills, gazed at the empty dining room adjacent to the kitchen (indents in the carpet revealed where the last inhabitant had placed a table and four chairs, almost as if the ghost of the last graduate student brought a dining room set with her into the afterlife), and was now intrigued by a shredded, green-foil mess under the dishwasher. chocolate.

“i didn't even know i had chocolate balls covered in green foil.” halloween. shit. the ball was half eaten and covered in gnaw marks. tiny shreds of green foil were all around it like a tiny explosion had occurred on the linoleum floor. realization results, denial's desirable. some other explanation, but no other explanation fits. “maddi was here last weekend.” what does a visit from your sixteen year-old sister have anything to do with this? “she brought halloween candy from mom.” so you're suggesting that maddi got down on all fours and gnawed with two tiny teeth at a chocolate ball without removing the wrapper and spitting the shreds of foil in a near-perfect circumference around the chocolate? “isn't that preferable?” i like the optimism.

“i have a mouse.”

“i have gonorrhea.”

“mine is curable.”

“gonorrhea is curable; you're thinking of herpes. what should i do?”

“get a trap.”

“i don't think they make traps, it's not crabs for pete's sake.”

“they make such a mess though, what with blood all over the place and whatnot.”

“that sounds painful.”

“maybe a glue trap.”

“oh, you're still talking about the mouse. how do you know it's a mouse? could be a rat.”

“definitely better make it a glue trap then.”

“don't they have humane traps?”

“i don't know, i've never had to deal with this before.”

Appellant spent an entire year in a legal writing course at the Dickinson School of Law. Although a philosophy major and a regular writer of non-legal material, Appellant realized that bills had to be paid by some means and, as such, turned to a hopefully profitable career in the field of law. Said career need not be profitable to a lucrative extent, but merely to sustain Appellant in such a way as to allow him (pronoun error) to maintain his (pronoun error) writing habits. However undesirable, the dilemma had to be rectified and law offered a solution, although it was not his (pronoun error) first choice of profession, he (pronoun error) excelled in logic and nailed a respectable score on the Law School Admission Test (hereinafter LSAT) with little to no effort.

Upon completing the equivalent of two semesters of legal writing coursework, Appellant received his lowest grades (ambiguity) in his law school career and, more importantly, his writing has suffered a dramatic deterioration in both creative nature and stylistic freedom.

d-Con® and Rodex® get center stage in the pest control section at Wal-Mart®. you can find it at the end of the house cleaning aisle, next to the frozen foods (that's just good floor planning). as you decide between the anticoagulant superwarfarins or a T-Rex® spring trap, you can also grab some Bagel Bites®, that way you don't go hungry as you wait for the rodents to consume enough of the odorless, tasteless chemical to thin their blood to the point of internal hemorrhaging. the selling point is that the mice do not become bait shy to the chemical when it is mixed into the sea-green block that d-Con sells at a grocery store near you. crosstrife considered the consequences of d-Con's use. a week spent as the mouse slowly chips away at the block until the blood is thin enough to stop delivering the oxygen it needs to survive. the heart begins to pump faster to compensate for the lack of oxygen flow until it's beating so fast that it begins to rupture itself, or, if that doesn't occur first, the organs will have so much wear and tear from rapid, thin blood flow that they will begin to burst. the bursted organs will leak blood internally with every fast-paced pump the heart throws at it, slowly filling all of the internal cavities until it's too flooded to even breathe, resulting in a type of asphyxiation that leaves the mouse somewhere in your house taking tiny gasps for air as it chokes on its own bodily fluids. crosstrife isn't particularly aligned with the camp of animal rights, but the thought of a mouse crawling behind an appliance and drowning in its own blood doesn't sound too appealing. especially since he probably wouldn't find the mouse until a week or two later when the stench of decomposition makes it all too obvious that the bait has served its purpose.

there are bait traps and bait stations, snap traps and glue traps, even an odd sort of trap in an enclosed box that claims to deliver a strong enough electrical shock to kill a mouse instantly. despite a wide variety of options, there is not a single humane trap in the five rowed section.

“so, what now?” look, we know it's eating things off of the floor, who knows what else it has managed to get into. this problem needs to be eliminated. “but i don't want to have to clean up a mess.” then get the electric shock trap. sounds interesting enough. “suppose it doesn't work and it just gives the thing a seizure or something, then i have this live mouse with physical defects and i can't deal with that. plus it's twenty times more expensive than the other options.” so get a glue trap it'll keep from making a mess. “aren't they still alive on those glue pads?” i thought you didn't want to have to deal with death? “well, i don't want to just throw it away alive either.” so set it free after you catch it, it's glue, pull its legs free or something. “what if it hurts being stuck in the glue.” damn it, this is ridiculous. are we taking care of the problem or not? look, that glue trap says that it has eugenol, a natural anesthetic. the mouse won't feel a thing. “eugenol? where do i know that from?” the dentist. “no, i remember something about eugenol. biochem maybe?” it doesn't matter, it's the best option. just do it.

After only a semester's worth of work, Appellant began to feel the numbing effect the legal education began to have upon his writing. One decision to eradicate a dilemma had lead Appellant down a road of nothing but undesirable alternatives until he felt trapped in a situation that had left his legal writing unclear and his creative writing inhuman(e). Defendants would insist that nothing in the chain of events can be reasonably inferred as an action on their part which definitively lead to Appellant's downfall, (punctuation error) therefore, “[t]he law of causation, remote or proximate, is thus foreign to the case before us.” Palsgraf v. The Long Island Railroad Co. , 248 N.Y. 339, 346 (1928).

However, upon completion of one year's worth of legal education, Appellant came to realize that his writing was not sufficient enough to serve even a secretary at a law firm, let alone a full-time attorney. Appellant then learned of the existence of a course entitled, “Writing and Editing,” which was suggested by his legal writing professor as a way to daintily escape from the sticky stagnancy into which his writing had devolved. This course would eventually prove to be only more troublesome for the disenfranchised wordsmith.

the air in the small kitchen hung thick with the musty smell of fur and struggle; crosstrife didn't need to open the pantry door to know that the glue traps had been effective. the smell was reminiscent of years spent in a basement laboratory at the university of washington medical center. as he opened the door and gazed down at the light gray mouse, the first piece of anatomy that called his attention was the bulbourethral gland housed in its large external sac. this is that big bulge at the back of a mouse that everyone thinks are the rodent's balls; true, its testicles are in there as well, but its the bulbourethral gland that makes it so large.

“it's male. at least it's not female, otherwise i would have to assume that she has a nest in my house.” males don't have nests? “males just set up franchises.” well he's disenfranchised now. “he's young. odds are that he hasn't gotten old enough to want to mate yet, that's why he lives all alone in my house.”

the tail was draped across the middle of the glue pad, covered in peanut butter (which had acted as bait), the tip was lightly ensnared by the adhesive. the tail was the least of the mouse's worries. both hind legs had become pinned, the mouse lay on its left side, certainly not intentionally, but this was the position it fell into as it realized that the floor had somehow managed to grip its tiny feet. now forced to its side, it's likely that the mouse attempted to push itself up with its left, front limb, which is why it now lay completely helpless in the glue below crosstrife. only its right, front limb remained free and it flailed about as its heart pounded. the tiny heart pumped faster as crosstrife approached, causing its entire chest to throb violently. it had been the mouse's custom to flee under any dark crevice upon hearing or seeing the human, and it had done so quite successfully up until this point. even with three of the four limbs trapped in the viscosity below, this still was not the greatest cause of worry to the tiny mouse. in the course of having its limbs trapped below and struggling against the glue pad, the mouse had likely attempted to use its snout as leverage to hopefully nudge its way to freedom. as a result, the left side of its face, up to its snout, had become trapped as well. it is also likely that when the mouse realized that even its head was trapped against the ground, panic mode ensued, causing the mouse to defecate all over the pad below. the feces included three or four pellets in their oblong form, the type most people recognize, but there was also some brown-type liquid feces which could only be from nervousness, which made its stomach upset, which forced some acidic materials to leak. rodent diarrhea.

he shat himself. “let's just get him out of here.” where will you take him?

crosstrife peered across the street from the storm door. straight ahead, over two hundred yards away, a small christian church had a large, green dumpster.

i thought you said you didn't want to throw him away alive? “i don't. i'll get him free from the glue in the large grass area near the church and then throw the glue pad into the dumpster.”

crosstrife bent down and picked the glue pad up. crosstrife stood at the storm door for a moment and waited until no cars could be seen from either direction. the coast was clear. (the phrase always reminds him of a time when the seas were the greatest threat upon land.)

orchid bees. biochem. eugenol was used to attract male orchid bees. “oh that's just fabulous. so while i'm out here trying to get this mouse free i'm going to be attracting bees.” orchid bees. unless you are traveling to central or south america to set the mouse free you should be fine. but overdose of eugenol causes diarrhea, convulsions and an increased heart rate… which explains a lot. “well is it at least serving its anesthetic purpose?” barely, if at all. “did you know that before i bought these?” yeah, i guess i did. “i hate you sometimes.”

crosstrife knelt down where the asphalt met a curb at the edge of the grassy field. “sorry it came to this. if you had just lived outside and not entered my house we would have never had to deal with any of this. you'll be free soon enough though. you'll see. you'll just have to live with the glue in your fur for a little while.” crosstrife saw the silent mouse stare attentively at him with its only free, glassy eyeball. crosstrife was reminded again of the medical lab. nothing he had done in that lab, even after euthanizing dozens and maybe even hundreds of mice, nothing came close to the sheer brutality of the glue trap. on several occasions crosstrife had been accosted by liberals as he entered the medical building, all of whom had been protesting the practice of animal testing. crosstrife couldn't help but chuckle to himself as he saw the Nalgene® bottles so many animal rights activists seemed to adore. hypocrites. no, not the right word, too harsh. misinformed. no, no one had offered them the information in the first place. ignorant. i'm sure that all of them would be shocked to learn that Nalgene made not only the plastic autoclavable bins that the mice called home, not only the wire tops that served as feeders, not only the water bottles used for the mice's alimentation, but more importantly, and probably most disturbingly, Nalgene made the animal restraints that were regularly used on the primates and other, larger, animals.

as crosstrife made the first attempts of separating the mouse from the glue, it began to be painfully obvious (both to crosstrife and the mouse, but mostly the mouse) that this was not to be an easy task. knowing how many diseases and sicknesses your average rodent in the wild may carry, crosstrife was all too hesitant to touch the mouse in any way. he shook the glue pad lightly, hoping that the force of gravity would be enough to bring the mouse out of its captive state. when this proved utterly unsuccessful, crosstrife attempted dragging the mouse's small body against the soft grass, beginning at the mouse's lower body and dragging upward to free the rest. other than gather fallen leaves in a sticky mess against the pad, this action had little effect. crosstrife attempted applying a little more pressure while dragging the mouse across the soft grass. this managed to bring freedom to both of the hind legs. a sudden surge of hope rushed through them both and the mouse began kicking its newly freed legs in hopes of escaping. crosstrife attempted another drag across the grass, and another, and yet another, but nothing seemed to bring the mouse any closer to freedom.

Appellant's enrollment in the class entitled “Writing and Editing” appeared helpful at first and gave Appellant knowledge of certain sentence structures and forms of speech. Appellant felt as if with each class he managed to shake off some of the muck that had ensnared his writing and brought it down to the pitiful state he was now in. Although each shake seemed to provide a certain amount of hope, it eventually simply began to shake the will to write from the Appellant.

crosstrife realized that a new method would be necessary. he held the glue pad nearly a foot off of the ground and shook the pad down forcefully, hoping that the force, the sudden stop and gravity would work together to finish the job. a small portion of the mouse's back came free from the pad but the upper body, shoulders and head remained firmly planted against the adhesive. crosstrife gave a second shake, a little more forcefully this time. from the time he held the glue pad in his hands until they reached the grassy field, the mouse squealed only once and it had been when crosstrife first lifted the glue pad off of his kitchen floor. either the mouse had sensed that crosstrife's intentions were good and freedom would be delivered, or it had resigned itself to the idea that the end was near and no amount of bemoaning would alter its fate. however, as this second shake had been more forceful, it had also forced a sharp squeal from the small creature. it seemed nearer to a shriek of pain than the squeal that crosstrife heard from it earlier. although it had shrieked, it had also been freed up to the shoulders. crosstrife braced himself and the pad in a tighter grip and prepared for what would follow.

“i'm sorry if that hurt. we're almost there though. you're just barely stuck on that pad. i think one more good shake should do it.” crosstrife lowered his knee to the ground and braced his free hand on the cement curb below. he lifted the pad higher in the air than he had on either of his previous attempts and held it there for only a moment in anticipation. he brought the glue pad down abruptly, with nearly as much force as his arm could muster. upon bringing the glue pad to an abrupt halt, a sharp, pained squeal emanated from the pad and an odd popping sound came almost simultaneously. to his dismay, crosstrife could still feel the weight of the mouse attached to the pad.

he slowly turned the pad over and found, to his horror, that the mouse was breathing harder than it had been at any other point. though the shoulders remained firmly planted against the adhesive, the mouse's head was free. at first this sparked crosstrife's excitement, but the more he observed, the worse he realized the situation to be. a patch of fur and tissue remained where the head had been trapped against the pad. amidst the fur, tissue and veiny substances in between, a distinct blue-black ball remained against the glue, staring at crosstrife from an entirely new angle. it looked like a small blueberry had attached itself to the glue pad, as if the blueberry had been picked up along with the leaves and other debris. crosstrife examined the tiny, little blueberry and it looked to him as though it would leave the same kind of nasty, purple stain on whomever ventured to touch it. it took a moment for this blueberry, covered in small red lines and stringy substances, to register in crosstrife's mind as the mouse's eyeball.

crosstrife felt a sudden urge to vomit as he beheld the skin and eyeball that had been pulled clean from the mouse's face. he looked at the mouse, a veiny skull shone through where the face had been attached only one shake earlier. nothing seemed to free the mouse and even if it had, the mouse would be doomed to certain death.

crosstrife became nauseous and nervous, unsure of what to do, or how to handle the situation at this point. the mouse was hardly moving, it had likely fallen into a state of shock and crosstrife could only hope that the eugenol was having some friendly effect on the state of the mouse's pain. nervously, crosstrife looked in all directions, ashamed and afraid that someone would see his abominable work. he picked up the glue pad and approached the dumpster that sat at the back of the church's parking lot.

“i'm so sorry. i don't know what else to do.” he came to the dumpster and attempted to lift the lid. try as he might, he could pry it no further than a mere couple of inches. crosstrife slipped the glue pad, mouse and all, into the small opening and heard it drop to the bottom of an empty dumpster. crosstrife turned to leave, making it only a few steps before the propensity of his actions sunk in.

i thought the whole reason that we went with the glue pad was to avoid pain, suffering, and death. “well i could have never imagined that it would go down like this.” who could? but are you really going to leave that mouse like that? it's still alive. “oh no.” and lonely at the bottom of a dumpster where it will suffer until the bitter end. “i just wasn't thinking. i was so upset.” well, better get back there and finish the job. no sense in leaving him like that.

crosstrife turned and in a matter of seconds he had become resolute in his determination to end the mouse's suffering. it was an odd feeling that washed over him as he approached the dumpster, the empty and dead feeling of a person resolved to kill. which makes one wonder: is it the killer who dies first? regardless, it had already been reasoned out and decided, so reason no longer played a part.

crosstrife attempted to open the dumpster once more and found that it still refused to open any further than a small crack. he searched the lid to find what prevented it from opening fully. a large padlock rested on either side of the lid, meant to prevent people from dumping their own refuse in the church's bin. they had almost worked. crosstrife knew he could not break the padlocks so he approached the middle of the lid once more and lifted it as far from the dumpster as he could. with just enough for his arm to slip inside, he reached below. the dumpster, as it had sounded from the fall of the glue pad, was indeed empty and the glue pad sat far below; it sat far below crosstrife's reach.

from a distance it looked as though a young man had managed to trap his arm inside the lid of the dumpster and as he struggled and pressed, his feet slipping out from under him as he pushed with all of his might in an attempt to force his hand closer to the bottom, it looked as though he were fighting against the dumpster in an attempt to escape. but there was no escape to be had, for the victim wanted to be trapped.

the resolution that had once been to kill now turned to an even bleaker state: helplessness. helplessness as crosstrife realized that he could not accomplish even the most brutal of desires. he would have to consciously leave the mouse to suffer and die a slow, painful death at the bottom of a dumpster. crosstrife slouched against the side of the large, green receptacle and slowly slid to a sitting position. crosstrife's head was in his hands and the mouse's life was on his head.