Trap
by Oonah V
Joslin
Sal and I have
coffee once a week at hers. I like her. She’s
eccentric - and young - unlike my other friends.
A few weeks ago we were having coffee in the
garden when she suddenly got up, in the middle of
what I was saying, but I’ve learned not to
take offense, and came back with a bottle of
sherry and two tall glasses.
“It’s
a bit early for me dear,” I said.
She looked
blankly at me and then caught on. “Oh,
it’s not for us. It’s for the wasps
– a trap,” she explained and pouring a
small amount of sherry into each glass, she
placed them in corners of the garden well away
from the house. “They go in for the sherry
and get sticky and can’t climb out,”
she told me. “It works for garden snails too.”
“Sherry?”
“No beer.”
Away she went
and fetched a photograph - a wagon train of
snails crossing the lawn towards a buried beer
glass and disappearing over the edge to their
doom. It’s one thing to set a trap but to
photograph actual snailicide… I was quite
shocked.
Only a
fortnight later, I opened her fridge to get milk
for the coffee. “Sal, what is that smell?”
It smelt like sweaty socks and I was half
expecting to find a pair of dead feet inside.
“It’ll
be the gorgonzola,” she said.
“You’re
not going to eat that are you?” I asked.
“I know some people love powerful cheeses
but how would you get that from under your nose,
into your mouth?”
“No
it’s for the mice,” she said. “I
think we may have mice and I don’t want to
kill them…”
I was thankful
for that. At least I wouldn’t have to watch
the snuff movie.
“…so
I’ve bought humane traps and I’m going
to put some cheese in each one,” she said,
“and then I can drive somewhere and let them
go.”
I thought it a
bit extravagant. My mice had to make do with
plain biscuit and a quick dispatch.
Anyway,
yesterday she had a lunch date with a young man
and was getting ready for it after we’d
finished our coffee. She particularly wanted me
to see her new shoes. They were baby pink patent
leather with a cerise bow on the front and cerise
four inch stiletto heels accentuated by a
vertical gold strip.
“Very
nice,” I said. I wondered whether they were
a man trap or a death trap.
|
