Ususama-myō-ō, the Japanese toilet god: the presumed hero of this story.
A late night in New York City moment:
Around 3am I awoke to avail myself to the toilet, and when I turned on the bathroom light, I noted two dark objects floating in the bowl. I knew that nothing had been left from earlier use of the commode, and upon closer examination I realized that the objects were a pair of mice that had somehow made their way into the bathroom, encountered my toilet, fallen in, and unceremoniously drowned. My apartment's lights had been out for just over an hour before I made my discovery. For whatever reason, they must have been investigating that space in search of food — a hopeless mission if ever there were one — and they must lost their footing on the slick porcelain rim's surface. (I leave the seat up in case of an overnight pee break.) How both of them ended up in the water I cannot say, but I wonder if one fell in and the other met the same fate by attempting to rescue its fellow. Whatever the case, I flushed the toilet and sent the corpses on their waterlogged way, followed by a liberal spraying of bleach upon the rim.
The mice that periodically invade my building are always small enough to flush down the toilet, as I have done several times previously when emptying them from my electric mousetraps, so clogging the works was not a worry. They usually stalk my kitchen surfaces, no matter how often I clean them, but, for no adequately explained reason, this time around they chanced the alabaster temple of the indoor whirlpool and lost.
Anyway, that's two invaders down, with zero effort from me, so I suppose thanks to Ususama-myō-ō, the Japanese toilet god, are in order.
