This is a better mousetrap. Not just better, unrecognisably better. This is the Victor Mousetrap.
This thing’s amazing. It lures the mouse in using bacon bits, before a series of three electrically-charged plates sense, then kill, the mouse. Once the mouse is dead, the ‘shock chamber’ rotates, depositing the mouse in a receptacle, out of sight of other mice that might succumb to bacon temptation but could be alerted to their impending demise by the sight of a recently expired friend.
I want M. Night Shyamalan to make a movie for mice based on the legend of this thing.
Unexplained, mice keep disappearing, their disappearance always preceded by the faint smell of bacon. As the mouse population dwindles, one brave mouse, ostracised by the broader mouse community, a genetic freak, born with no sense of smell, represents the best chance of mouse survival.
Uniquely able to resist the bacon allure, he watches and waits. He watches the mice go in. And he waits, in vain, for the mice to come out. He watches the man, the monster, who controls the bacon machine. He stalks the man. He learns to sense what the man is doing, to ‘hear’ him think. He waits and he plots. He knows what he must do.
He hears the man think. He tries to understand. He hears the man think of the woman he loves, the woman he courts, the woman he wants to make his wife. He hears the man think of her, of her fear of dirt, her fear of filth, of her fear of mice. He hears the man regard his own fear, the fear of rejection, the fear that this woman, the one, will learn that his house has been home to mice. He hears the man think that all mice must die, must be purged, his house made clean so that she may be his. The mouse knows what he must do. The mouse waits.
He hears the man come into the driveway. He hears him open the front door, he hears her, the man’s dream, come into the house, the clean, rodent-free house. The mouse waits. He hears them sit down. He hears the wine pour, he hears the woman laugh, politely, as the man apologises for the state of the place. He hears the man lie, ‘I haven’t had time to clean’. He hates the man.
He waits and he listens. He hears the man think. He sees the man watching the woman. He sees the hope in the man’s eyes, he hears the longing in the man’s voice.
‘I’ve been wondering’, the man says, ‘whether you might like to…’. The mouse takes his opportunity. He leaps onto the woman’s lap. She screams as she runs. ‘It’s a mouse’ she cries. ‘It’s a hideous mouse, it’s disgusting,’ she screams as the door slams behind her.
As the mouse also flees, the last thing he hears is the sound of the man’s heart breaking. And now the man, the monster, knows the pain of loss.
But how does the mouse hear? How can a mouse hear the thoughts of a man? Because this is the mouse.
