By Stillman Brown
A few weeks ago, my roommate Becca and I were eating Chinese and watching Scrubs reruns on Comedy Central when a small, fast-moving gray object streaked out from under the futon and disappeared into a small ring of space between the radiator’s steam pipe and the floor. A couple of days afterward, I was climbing into bed when a similar gray missile entered my room via a crack between the door and its frame, made a circuit of my room, and exited through the same avenue. Later that night, I woke and wandered into the kitchen for a glass of water. In the harsh, flat-white light of the refrigerator bulb, a small gray body disappeared behind the stove. We had a mouse issue.
I took action. I went to Home Depot and procured two mouse traps and a package of eight bundles of steel wool (for plugging holes and cracks). The traps cost $3.45 each; the steel wool $2.78. The traps were traditional snap traps with futuristic styling – over the kill bar was a sleek black hood that hid the sinister moving parts from view. It looked like what they might have used onboard the Death Star to catch space mice.
Last week, I baited the traps with pea-sized clumps of peanut butter, set them, and went to bed. The next day the peanut butter was gone, but there were no mice. Nothing. Disappointed, I tried again the next night and just as I was wrapping up my meditation practice, mind at ease and body relaxed, I heard a snap. Suddenly, my mind was clouded, anxiety pricked my chest. I turned on the kitchen light and squatted next to the sprung trap, but it was too dark. I grabbed a flashlight, shined it in a small slit in the hood, and saw gray fir, two tiny red eyes, and a brace of small whiskers. “What if it isn’t dead yet?” I thought, a little panicked. I stood up and walked around the apartment for a few minutes, ashamed at my skittishness (“It’s just a mouse…”).
I opened the trap’s hood and saw there were actually two very small mice under the kill bar; juveniles. Both had been stretching to reach the peanut butter when their combined weight had tripped the bar, which came down just below their necks and killed them instantly. I looked for a long time, trying to describe their death in my own mind. I was struck not by their stillness, their absence of movement – it was the utter lack of resistance to the physical world. They occupied space without acting on it. For the first time, I understood what people mean when they see a corpse and understand it, instinctively, as nonliving. “I just knew,” they say.
I disposed of the mice, cleaned the traps, and put them away. I didn’t set them for another few days, although I’ve since caught two more (my roommates disposed of these).
I’ve thought of the two mice every day since then and I can’t enter my kitchen without remembering the moment when I saw them trapped under the metal bar, their bodies like two miniature balloons, pinched in the middle. This surprises me because my cultural training and assumptions say they’re just two mice – they’re pests that carry disease. They’re inconvenient. But apart from the dozens of spiders, centipedes, ladybugs, and beetles I gleefully slaughtered in childhood and adolescence, theirs are the first two lives I’ve taken.
If they had stayed out of sight we could have shared the apartment amiably, but they had become too bold and none of us relished the idea of having mice skitter over our bare feet on a Sunday morning. I don’t feel guilty but I do feel different. It’s a bodily feeling that doesn’t yet have a name.
So my question to the IDP community is this: What does the Buddha say about taking life? I would imagine he says, “Don’t,” but that doesn’t shed much light on my situation.