Last month, I unpacked my run-ins with mice at my college house, dwelling on the harrowing experience of taking a mouse out of the toilet.

While I was sad to leave my college home and lovely housemates after graduation, I was also looking forward to once again living in a house that had largely remained uninhabited by mice for the better part of my life.

It wasn’t until this past fall, over a year since I had moved back home, that I forced myself to face the truth.

When fishing around the pantry, I started to notice that a few peanut butter biscuit sandwiches had gaping holes in the side of the wrapper, along with bite marks. Call me ignorant or hopelessly optimistic, but I was sure that there was no way this could be from an animal. One of my siblings had probably taken a bite out of it and left it there.

Eventually, I talked to my dad about it. When I showed him the bitten-into wrappers, he frowned in confusion. He and Mom cleared off that shelf to check for droppings, and all was clear until they checked the pantry floor, underneath the old glassware.

A mix of anxiety and dread, something I thought I left in Michigan, came roaring back once I faced the reality behind the peanut butter biscuits.

It took Dad several different types of traps to begin catching mice, and not before they left some presents in another one of the drawers. Once he got the right trap, we caught a mouse a day three days in a row. After that streak, weeks passed with nothing in the traps.

The mice already felt like a distant memory when my sister Jess decided to move out of her bedroom in the basement to the empty room across from me.

The night before she decided to move, Jess ran up to my parents’ room, the way we all did as kids back when we had a bad dream, threw up, or wanted comfort during an awful storm. But Jess had an entirely new reason to add to this list.

She woke up Mom and Dad with frantic whispering. “There’s a mouse in my room!”

That sentence jolted Mom awake, and soon she and Jess were staring at Dad, who was still adjusting to reality after being yanked out of a nightmare.

“You gotta get up!” Mom said to Dad after Jess’s bombshell news didn’t send him upright.

“Why?” Dad mumbled, still under the covers.

“Because there’s a mouse!”

Eventually Mom and Jess were able to get my sleep-addled father out of bed, and the two of them crept downstairs.

When Dad recounted the story to me the following day, he explained how he expected the mouse to have run off after Jess made eye contact with it. But instead, Dad opened Jess’s bedroom door to see a small rodent poking out of Jess’s basket of snacks, chewing away.

Even when faced with two humans, the mouse stayed put. This is Dad’s favorite part of his retelling. “It felt like the mouse was saying, ‘Hey man, check out this spread!’” Dad explained, spreading out his arms with a wide smile.

If this is truly what the mouse was thinking, then the joy didn’t last. Dad had Jess get him a plastic bag and a broom, and he used both to cover the bin with the bag and run outside.

Once outside, he dumped the bin, and snacks tumbled out, candy fell to the ground, but there was no mouse. He ran back to Jess’s room to find the ever elusive creature. Dad spotted the little guy run behind some floor pillows before they disappeared from sight.

Dad caught two mice in the traps he set downstairs, so the mouse’s escape did not last for long. Save for many animated narrations of this three a.m. series of unpleasant events, the Hirner household has been quiet ever since.

But I’m not counting on the silence lasting forever; who knows what could be waiting for me at my next home?

Hopefully by then, I’ll have a cat by my side.

Liana Hirner

Liana Hirner graduated from Calvin in 2024 with a bachelor’s in writing. She currently lives in her hometown of Aurora, Illinois and works full-time in a warehouse filled with books waiting to be sorted. Writing is her first love, followed swiftly by lattes and dark chocolate.