Hugh has murdered two mice. Not invasive, threatening rodent-y creatures, mind you, but harmless little pet mice. Last Friday he and his friend, fooling around at the mall, decided to buy a little spotted pet mouse for $2.98. They played with it awhile and then, bored, let it loose in the nearby empty lot--and thus doomed the poor petshop mouse to a quick yet assuredly painful death. When Hugh told me, I calmly, via the Socratic method and much gentle probing and careful guiding, led him to see how wrong it is to use a living creature and then discard it.
If only. Of course I went ballistic, shrieking and wailing at him about ethics and responsibility while he grimaced and sighed.
Three days later, Hugh brings home another tiny mouse. "It's a present for Lindsay," he says. (I have no idea who Lindsay is.) He sets up a box, complete with wood shavings and a little food bowl and a water bottle and lots of toilet paper tubes. Yesterday, he tells me that the mouse kept jumping up and biting him, so he let it loose down the street.
Depressed and disconcerted, I poured out the tale to my Nail Lady. (Increasingly, the nail corner of the salon serves as my confessional, and Laurie as my priest.) Laurie listened quietly, then put down her file, covered my hand with hers, and said gently, "You know, this doesn't mean he's going to grow up to be a serial killer."
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