Tolik was a clever and gifted boy who always tried to invent something new. He had varying degrees of success, but by a genetic principle, the good ideas stuck while the bad ones fell by the wayside. Tolik was fortunate that his inventiveness found a worthy target in the form of mice that had somehow settled in his fifth-floor apartment.
The simple mousetrap was too basic and, more importantly, it only allowed for the capture of one mouse per night. Meanwhile, the mice were clearly multiplying faster. As a result, various additional methods were tried. For example, there was a stand made of foil with a nail sticking out of a hole in the center, and both the foil and the nail were connected to the nearest outlet. The mouse wasn’t fooled by this, as it sensed the electricity with its whiskers and didn’t touch the fat. Other methods were tested that required the mouse to climb onto a bucket and either drown, fall onto nails, die of envy, or something else. The mouse also showed no interest in climbing on buckets and preferred to head straight for the dining table. Additionally, Tolik tried to drive the mice away with cold, turning the kitchen into a winter chill. However, for the mouse living in the crawl space between the floorboards and the ceiling, such climatic exercises were of no concern.
One day, while strolling through a hardware store, Tolik noticed large, khaki-colored cans in the gardening section and asked the saleswoman what they were. Ingenuity and curiosity go hand in hand, and while most of us might simply walk past something unfamiliar and seemingly unnecessary, Tolik was not one to do that. If he didn’t know something, he felt compelled to fill that gap in his knowledge immediately. The saleswoman calmly replied, “Smoke bombs,” and turned away. Meanwhile, Tolik’s thoughts ricocheted a couple of times inside his skull and, with a flash visible in his eyes, crystallized into a plan to use WMDs in a particular apartment. “I’ll take two,” Tolik said, extending his shopping bag.
Tolik’s plan was simple: to set off a smoke bomb in the kitchen with the aim of killing the rodents that, according to his reasoning, should suffocate from the smoke. Tolik had carefully calculated and thought everything through. All that was left was to wait for his mom to leave the house. However, when his mom saw the smoke bombs, she sensed something was off and asked Tolik not to set them off at home. With innocent eyes, Tolik assured his mother that he wouldn’t set them off in the apartment. Of course. Smoke bombs don’t explode; they just emit smoke.
So, when Mom left for work, Tolik placed one of the firecrackers on the gas stove. He understood that putting a firecracker on the parquet floor was dangerous, which, by the way, indicates that Tolik was of sound mind and sober judgment. After that, he evacuated the cat and dog to the balcony in the neighboring room, then inserted a match into the firecracker, lit it, waited for the firecracker to ignite, and, following the instructions, extinguished the flame to let the smoke out. After that, Tolik closed the kitchen doors and went out to the balcony to join the waiting and noticeably anxious animals.
After waiting for half an hour, just when the mice, according to Tolik, should have been taking a break, he returned to the kitchen to check on things. However, he couldn’t see anything through the glass kitchen door. It was completely dark. At first, Tolik thought it was soot that had settled and was worried he would have to do some repairs in the kitchen. However, when he cracked the door open, he realized it wasn’t soot but smoke, which hung like a thick curtain, blocking all light from passing through.
The smoke had to be dealt with somehow. Moreover, it was gradually seeping into other rooms, and it was already clearly visible that small clouds of smoke were rising into the sky from the balcony door, where Tolik was standing with the animals. When the janitor, witnessing such a troubling sight, asked what was going on, Tolik confidently replied, “I’m dealing with mice.”
One way to get rid of the smoke would have been to open the kitchen window. However, getting to that window would require navigating through the acrid smoke and feeling your way. It was also clear that he would need to approach the window and open it while holding his breath, and since the windows were high, he would additionally need to set up a stool and climb onto the windowsill to unlock it. Given these circumstances, it was obvious that Tolik was seriously counting on finding the next breath of fresh air just beyond the open window. He had no option to retreat from the smoke.
To keep the smoke out of his eyes, Tolik put on swimming goggles and prepared for the onslaught. It’s worth mentioning that Tolik’s kitchen window faced the entrance of one of the factories, and at that moment, the shift was ending, so a crowd had gathered below. The people leaving the factory probably would never forget this scene: Naked Tolik, wearing only his underwear and swimming goggles, stood fully upright in the wide-open window from which thick black smoke was billowing, shouting, “It’s not a fire! Keep moving!” The situation was made even more amusing by the fact that Tolik, to make himself clearer, was gesturing with his hands to deny the existence of a fire, but it was obvious from below that the young man was clearly swimming the breaststroke. Especially in his swimming goggles.
Well, no one called for a fire department. They called an ambulance instead. But the ambulance wasn’t rushing because it wasn’t a heart attack case, and by the time it arrived, it was just to pick up Tolik’s mom, who had started feeling unwell from the fact that soot had settled on everything it could, including the ceilings, wallpaper, carpets, dishes, furniture, and clothes. On top of the soot, the apartment now had what people would call a “smoky flavor,” making it uninhabitable for at least a month.
And what about the mice? The mice living under the floor didn’t care at all about what was happening up above. After all, the smoke was hot and accumulated more under the ceiling than under the floor. Later, a cat that had been brought in for this purpose caught the mice.