It was after the first frost of the year, when the rodents and the insects began to find their way inside the house and every day is a battle against drafts coming through aged window frames, that Mike first caught a glimpse of the goblin. It was just darting behind the dresser when he saw it and by the time he got there it was long gone but the next day holes in the bag of bread confirmed it.
Mike hated to kill anything that he didn’t have to, it seemed like a waste, so he first set a live trap and bated it with a couple of the slices of the bread. Goblins are a little too smart for that he quickly discovered, he found the door of the trap had been propped open with one of his copies of Playboy, which the goblin had rolled up.
Since the goblin had refused to take the hint Mike decided it was going to have to go in a less pleasant fashion so he bought a glue trap, they were only a dollar something at the hardware store and highly recommended to him by one of his coworkers. He set out the trap and headed to his room, not because he was tired but because he knew that the goblin wouldn’t come out unless he was gone. Mike was sitting in his room, doing his homework for the first time in a week because he didn’t have anything else to do, when he heard a strange noise coming from the kitchen. He could only assume that he had caught the goblin.
Now Mike was confronted with a new and even less pleasant train of thought then the idea of the glue trap in the first place. Mike recollected having his mother tell him that you can’t get something out of a glue trap once it’s been caught, not without being bitten and catching goodness knew what kind of diseases. Mike’s mother had always told him that when she caught something in a glue trap she would just throw it out in the bushes by the back fence and allow it to freeze to death. It took Mike about an hour to gather up the courage to go into the kitchen to face this ordeal. The kitchen was empty, not only was there no goblin, there was also no trap, or any of his bread left from the shelf.
What drove Mike to finally buy a lethal spring trap was finding the glue trap, with the glue licked out of it, next to his bed one morning. That was when he decided that the goblin had to go no matter what, it was mocking him now. Winter had now truly descended on the city as Mike ventured out on his errand. His car was sitting in the driveway but the brakes weren’t working right on it anymore, making it dangerous to drive, and he couldn’t afford to get it fixed yet, so he walked to the store. It was probably only ten degrease below freezing but it felt colder because of the wind.
When Mike finally got to the store he felt too embarrassed to ask where the traps were and which ones worked best from the sales clerk who looked like an angel. He went to that store only to see her, though he had never gained the courage to talk to her, she was impossible to approach as she sat on her pedestal behind her till. Mike always went to a different check out, even when the line was longer.
After a fifteen minutes searching through the store he finally found the traps near the scented candles. They didn’t have traps large enough however; all they had were ones large enough for mice. Goblins might get their fingers broken, Mike decided, but they weren’t going to die from that, and by now he wanted this goblin to die.
“Do you have any larger traps?” Mike asked a nearby sales person in a hoarse whisper. Even with a entire store between them he didn’t want his checkout angel to know what he was looking for.
To be continued...
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