Well, it was getting dark and I just didn’t feel like dealing with it. I left it for the morning.

Got up this morning and checked the patio. No mouse barf!

Thank you, possum!

Every household should have its own possum. They make the best mess-disappearers.

The poor dead mouse lies cold on the concrete slab

The alleged perpetrator: Sydney, aka “Pooter,” a known thug and enemy of all rodents. Persons close to the alleged killer claim she is a member of the terrorist group the Minutekitties.

The alleged perpetrator of the mouse's untimely demise

Still quivering, but it was in no condition to escape. Made my stomach lurch to see it. Don’t look at the photos if you’re squeamish.

Sydney checks for witnesses.

I think we're alone now.

Crunch crunch crunch.

Mouse heads, mouse heads, yummy yummy mouse heads.

I found the rat Thursday afternoon. I’ll leave it for the possum, I thought.

The rat was still there Friday. Guess the possum wants it a little riper, I thought.

Saturday the rat started to stink. I made sure not to open the bedroom window, which opens to the lawn. Sitting on the patio wasn’t too bad, depending which way the breeze blew. There were probably maggots, but I wasn’t going to check. Tomorrow, I thought, tomorrow I’ll have to bury it.

Early Sunday morning I woke to the smell of rat, then went back to sleep. After my husband and I were both awake, I offered to toss a coin for the privilege of burying the rat. Lucky me! He had a brand-new shovel he wanted to try out.

He came back in a few minutes later. “The rat wasn’t there.”

Yum. Guess that possum was letting it age to perfection.

Sorry, no photos this time.

This orange came off my husband’s tree. Isn’t this the most disgusting orange you’ve ever seen? I have a few thoughts on what it looks like, but I’ll let you pretend you’re a Muppet Baby and use your imagination.

Hobbes, Sydney, and mouse

Sydney and Hobbes sort of have an agreement: Sydney catches ’em, Hobbes eats ’em. Looks here like Sydney’s rethinking that agreement, or at least is making sure Hobbes knows just which of them is the Mighty Hunter.

I much prefer for Hobbes to do the eating; that cat has a cast-iron stomach. Sydney doesn’t — bird, rat hindquarters, whatever gets upchucked, and she has no shame about depositing it on my office floor. You cannot believe how disgusting it is to clean up bloody cat barf that’s still warm.

Approaching the steps and bloodstain

Looking down on the bloodstain

One day my little friend Sydney caught a bird and left its bleeding carcass at the back steps. (She loves me, oh yes she does.) It lay there for several hours before I found it, and by that time the blood had soaked into the concrete.

I washed the spot with a bleach-based bathroom cleaner, and still the bloodstain remains. You can see how the cleaner killed the lichen and bleached the area immediately around the stain.

(The lichen is a welcome guest, by the way, and grows on the vertical sides of the steps and in broad patches on the patio itself. It will eventually eat through the concrete, but I enjoy watching it change through the seasons. The lichen gets a little furrier during the winter, flakier in the summer.)

Why on earth did I file this under Writing? Research, of course. You never know when you might need to know what a pool of blood — and that bird had an amazing amount of blood for a critter so small — does to concrete.