Two funerals and the bug's revenge

The carnage of a day, when death lingers in the air and you realize just how short life is. Today I witnessed 2 deaths, which is one more death than I can usually handle.

Okay, first death... it was all my fault, actually. The household was terrorized by another tiny rodent. I let it go for a while, maybe a couple of weeks or so, until the critter yanked on the proverbial last straw and dared to gnaw on the cable. So I set off on a mouse-hunt, took out my trusty old mouse-trap and baited it with a left over fish head. I must say, for a creature with a brain the size of a corn kernel (or smaller even), this guy was smart. It had eluded capture for two days, a record in my book, and had even been able to unhook the bait a couple of times. It was frustrating, to say the least, waking up early in the morning, all set to cook a breakfast of deep fried food, when in a flash the rodent would jump off the kitchen counter like a spring and listen to me while in mid-flight, shrieking like a little girl and running off in my boxers.

Anything that could scare the heck out of me that way deserves to be terminated, if only to nurse a man's pride back to non-pathetic levels.

I do some psychological theorizing, if this rodent keeps up getting free meals out of the trap, then it's bound to get overconfident and be reckless. That single mistake would be all the chance I need for victory to be mine! Eventually, the law of averages was bound to catch up to him.

So I bait the trap again, chanting curses and making offerings to the god of hunters, and wondering how much it would cost to have this particular rodent gutted, stuffed and mounted on a shelf.

Of course, after an hour, the bait was gone again. Why have the gods forsaken me?

This morning, I was overcome with joy at what I saw struggling and writhing in the mousetrap! The furry little beast of torment was caged at last! I lift up the cage up to my face and heckle away, unmindful of the horror that must be running in its tiny little brain. I set it back down and began thinking of what to do next, while it looked up at me with black, beady eyes and paws clasped in front of it. So I "mercifully" passed judgment, down the drain it went, via the toilet's raging counter-clockwise current.

The second death, I found a little birdie lying on its back on the 3rd floor of our offices, right smack in the middle of my favorite smoking spot. It wasn't the usual "maya" that we see in the city, the office is in a province after all, situated in the middle of two lakes and hectares of former rice paddies and grasslands. It was one of those grass-birds (sorry, that's the best description I could think of), long legs, tails and beaks.

I used my foot to nudge it here and there, trying to figure out if it was indeed dead or just getting some shuteye. When I was certain that it was lifeless, I tried to investigate the cause of death. There were no bullet marks, no gashes nor bite marks. For all I knew, it might have just been old age or a massive coronary mid-flap. Then I noticed a rather distinct, dusty "splat-mark" on the clear glass window. Ooooh... bird with a not-so-sharp eyesight, it seems. Such a waste.

Googling "taxidermy", I didn't think I had the particular skills, fortitude, nor preservatives to take up a new hobby. So, to keep the whole cycle of life ticking, I pick up the carcass and place it on the base of the nearest potted plant I could find. Here, I thought, it would rot into a noble cause, fertilizing the thorny rose bush my boss planted.

I was watching the dead bird, lying still and starting the long, drawn-out process of decomposition when this bug all of a sudden landed on it. It was a ladybug, all red with black spots (well, it actually looked more like squares up close), buzzing to a soft landing on the bird's wing. I wanted to take a photo, but unfortunately I didn't have my camera-phone on me. It was cute, though, up until when the bug crawled its way to the bird's head and made a meal out of the eyeball. Eww...

Now that is what I call IRONY.