Gothamist covers New York City’s rodent problem closely. But last week the story hit a little too close to home.
My girlfriend and I were watching “The Bear” on our couch in Brooklyn on Tuesday when I heard a squeak beneath the cushion.
“I kind of thought I was going crazy because we were sitting and watching TV and all of a sudden, even though we weren’t moving, I hear this little ‘kh, kh, kh’ behind the couch, and it’s a sound that is all too familiar to me because I’ve had mice before,” my girlfriend, Emily Bonnet, recalled.
I jumped up and pointed to a fidgeting mold in the shape of a mouse underneath the upholstery of the couch. Not in the cracks or crevices, but within the couch-equivalent epidermis.
I had no words. … There was a mouse in our couch.
title=”YouTube video player” frameborder=”0″ allow=”accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share” allowfullscreen>
“Really the stuff of a horror film,” Emily told me. “It looks like an alien is about to pierce through our couch, which is everybody’s dream scenario.”
My old roommates and I bought the couch four years ago — it never impressed us, but the price was good and the cushion sittable. When I moved in with my girlfriend, the couch came with me and it became our tête-à-tête. But now it’s shifted from our place of comfort to our cushion of horror.
There was nothing in my life that would prepare me for this very specific situation. If a mouse was running around the apartment, or crawling up a shelf, my response would’ve maybe been more straightforward. But I grew up in temperature-controlled houses on a literal desert island. We never had mice! What did I know about rodent invasions in contemporary furniture?
So I panicked. Just the thought of the little guy escaping and running around the apartment – or worse, touching one of us (mostly me) – was enough to turn my stomach. We tossed all the couch cushions to the floor so we could see what the hell was going on underneath.
As the ominous mouse-shaped lump kept moving through the padding of the couch, I quickly browsed through Reddit threads with similar prompts, but no one had dealt with this particular scenario. One person noticed pieces of foam that were chewed on underneath their couch, but there was no sight of a moving critter. Another Redditor discovered a mouse on top of their sofa, quickly escaping into the cracks between the cushions. And one TikToker enlisted her two dogs to claw out and kill a mouse that was nestled in their couch.
But we had no pets at our disposal, and most commenters on the internet physically saw a mouse — not just its body’s imprint inside a cushion — before they shared their rodent problem online.
Entomologist Gil Bloom, who’s president of the extermination company Standard Pest Management, told me he was dumbfounded by my rodent encounter.
“I can honestly say I’ve never seen a mouse crawling around, leaving its imprint underneath the material. I think the only time I saw that was in an episode of the Big Bang Theory,” Bloom said.
This was no help to me. I never watched the show.
Too scared to do it myself, I urged Emily to smack the unsettling, squirming mouse mold with one of my sandals by the door of our apartment. She bravely stepped up and grabbed my shahata – Arabic for slipper, and colloquially considered a powerful and precise weapon — and drew three sudden blows to the mouse, seemingly rendering it unconscious, or maybe even killing it.
I hurried downstairs to my neighborhood deli, L Mo’s Market in Bushwick. A man who I only know by the name of Sonny was working the night shift and I ran to him pleading for mouse traps. He laughed in my face, but also recoiled when I showed him the video Emily took of the moving bump in our couch. He pointed to a shelf in the back corner of the store stocked with spring-loaded and sticky mouse traps.
I bought both. And a jar of peanut butter.
When I got home, I laid out two spring traps by each end of the couch, and a glue trap directly across from the couch and underneath a TV console. Emily and I created a perimeter of death just in case the mouse was still alive and waiting for us to go to sleep.
I went to work the next day and my colleagues were horrified to hear what happened and made me write this story. They were even more upset to learn that the mouse (or its body) had not yet been located and that the couch was still in the apartment.
It’s unclear if the mouse is still alive. If it’s dead, we’ll likely smell it before we ever see it. In either case, we’re getting rid of the couch. At least that’s what Bloom, the exterminator, recommended we do. And as for why this bold creature chose our couch to hang out in, here’s what Bloom said:
“They like to be nocturnal and secretive, they like to nest. A couch is going to have great nesting material.”
Just our luck. Be careful out there.