When I slid out the trap from beneath Jen's desk, I noticed that the cow'rin,' tim'rous beastie stuck to the glue was far less furry than the mice who nibble hunks of cheese in storybooks. It was patchy, bald at its joints and on its haunches. It looked like a grandpa recent from a rough sponge bath.

In that moment I was at the crux of several conflicts of interest. My colleagues and I were interested in finishing our stories, cropping our images, arranging meet-ups with sources, and getting on with the business of feeding the internet and publishing a paper. But none of that could happen with the pitiful soundtrack of a mouse struggling for its life playing on quietly in the background. And while it was clear that everyone was interested in thinking about the mouse situation, no one seemed interested in doing anything about it. The mouse, of course, was interested in escaping its sticky fate—in not dying.

I realized that the afternoon would remain paralyzed until someone put their foot down, as it were. So. I had thoughts. I gathered materials. And then I stomped the mouse.

Since then I've been called a hero, a murderer, and a brute for my actions. Normally, I'd absorb and privately reflect on such criticisms alone in my apartment, or maybe over a beer with a few friends, but now that my name has been publicly dragged through the clouds and through the mud, I feel as if I must defend myself.

It's true, as Brendan says, that I thought to free the mouse with olive oil before I killed it. But it's not true that I refused to walk the two blocks to get olive oil due to, as he implied, a kind of moral laziness. In fact, my first thought was to search around the office for some olive oil, which I did. As I was moving around I started to remember facts about glue traps. I heard that the kind we used contained poison in the glue, which would seep up into the mouse's feet and kill it over time. I also remembered that mice often die shortly after being released from glue traps because of the trauma of trying to escape. And, of course, several try to bite their own arms off for the sake of freedom. Attempting to dislodge the mouse with oil, then, would only make me feel better about myself without improving the little guy's lot. The mouse would die a slow, painful death whether it remained on the glue trap or not.

So it was with a heavy heart and an even heavier boot that I did what I did and stomped the mouse. I felt the crush of soft bones and organs through the sole of my shoe. During the act my mind was blank. It was blank, too, after I'd thrown the mouse and its cardboard coffin into the dumpster behind the office. There was no heroic honor in it, but there was mercy. Murder is an issue of legality, and since a mouse can't sign a social contract not to murder it can't really murder or be murdered. But all of these rationalizations didn't make me feel better for ending a life that didn't want to end.

As I walked home that evening, though, all of my poet training returned to me.

I remembered, of course, Robert Burns's best laid schemes. Then Larkin's request to his fellow humans after finding a hedgehog jammed up in his mower blades: "we should be careful // Of each other, we should be kind / While there is still time."

But the thing that got me was the line from Virginia Woolf's "The Death of a Moth," the short masterpiece she wrote shortly before she committed suicide:

The possibilities of pleasure seemed that morning so enormous and so various that to have only a moth’s part in life, and a day moth’s at that, appeared a hard fate, and his zest in enjoying his meagre opportunities to the full, pathetic... What he could do he did. Watching him, it seemed as if a fibre, very thin but pure, of the enormous energy of the world had been thrust into his frail and diminutive body. As often as he crossed the pane, I could fancy that a thread of vital light became visible. He was little or nothing but life.

Woolf's moth was my mouse. To have only a mouse's part in life! And a day mouse's at that. In that moment, my body felt the weight of my own boot. My ribs broke and my organs split. Everyone knows that a man can be torn asunder just as easily as a mouse, but, helpfully, luckily, you don't feel that truth in your bones and muscles until those moments when you're doing the tearing yourself. There but for the grace of God go I, little mousy.

But then other lines came to me, too. A few from Camus's The Plague, where rats run wild with disease. Tennyson's "Nature, red in tooth and claw." Not to mention the fact that combines turn up and rip to shreds millions of mice as they harvest the soy, beans, and wheat that feed us. Even if you're a vegetarian or a vegan, there's no escape. We're animals that kill other animals, no matter what we eat.

And then, finally, thankfully, and as always, Whitman skipped into my head, that big gay Santa of life and death. In his poem "To One Shortly to Die," Whitman assumes the figure of Death, a role he often played in life as a battlefield nurse during the Civil War. In the poem, Death approaches a soldier and basically says, "Hey bud, you're gonna die, but that's okay!" Then, Death preforms a kind of necessary spell, a chant meant to soothe the one shortly to die, to make him proud of his life rather than depressed about his death:

The sun bursts through in unlooked-for directions!
Strong thoughts fill you, and confidence—you smile!
You forget you are sick, as I forget you are sick,
You do not see the medicines—you do not mind the weeping friends—I am with you,
I exclude others from you—there is nothing to be commiserated,
I do not commiserate—I congratulate you.

I do not pity you, mouse. I congratulate you, as I hope I am congratulated when Death's black boot stomps down on me.