Hantavirus can extinguish its human host by filling the lungs with fluid. Deer mice carry and spread the virus. It doesn’t kill them. That’s my job. Kill or be killed.
            After our wedding, my husband and I buy a home in the woods. Our ramshackle outbuildings are overrun. I pour bleach throughout the well house before sweeping away droppings. Moist brown pearls blink at me from behind fractured drywall.
            My husband proposes a tag and release program. “Only execute the repeat offenders.”
            Instead I set glue traps, a dollop of peanut butter on each. They aren’t lethal. I have to smack the rodents dead.
            “You can’t crush their chests.” He’s at the computer, reading a section of the California Fish and Game Code.
            I rest my chin on his right shoulder and study the screen. “They’re talking about fur-bearing mammals.” I point to the pertinent language.
            “Raccoons, foxes…”
            “Mice have fur.”
            “I’m not making a coat here. And besides, I hit them on the head.”
            “I’ve seen you with a hammer. You’re not that precise.”
            I switch to plastic snap traps and stop enlisting his help. I want to shield him from the ugliness—the lifeless eyeball bulging in the grip of serrated jaws. From a side of me he might prefer to disavow.
            I recycle the carcasses in the manzanita thicket. A gift for the coyotes and ravens.
            By December the infestation is under control, our property shored up. The latter is a joint effort. My contribution, crude demolition. His more deft, rebuilding something sturdy. When we collapse together on the couch at night, I’m overcome with an unfamiliar sensation.
            I feel safe.
            The following spring, I discover a mouse cowering in my potting bench drawer. It dives to the floor of the garden shed and skitters across the cement, taking refuge in a battered box of hand-painted ceramic tile.
            It leaves behind a nest. Straw and string. The shredded remains of the chainsaw owner’s manual.
            I don a mask and gloves and grab at the mess, uncovering a wormy creature half the length of a straight pin. Bright pink, like a piece of broken plastic from a child’s toy. It writhes at the sudden exposure.
            The mother squeaks from her hiding place. Frantic. Pleading.
            As if these vermin had emotions.
            I replace the detritus and close the drawer.

Renee S. Jolivette is a retired engineer with a Fiction Writing Certificate from the UCLAX Writers’ Program. Her work has appeared in The Union, Current, Cruisin’ News, Microfiction Monday, Bronco Driver and Portage Magazine.