Annie was a field mouse. She had a nice warm spot under an old milk crate in the basement of a human house, away from the cold of winter and the hawk and owl.

Annie was raising six tiny mouse babies that were smaller than dimes, and she had to have food to make milk for them. So she climbed along the rafters into the pantry of the human house to find a bag of pumpkin seeds there, and every day she would go eat five pumpkin seeds, take several pumpkin seed meats in her cheeks back to her little nest, and so she had plenty of milk for her babies.

One day, as she was eating a pumpkin seed, the door of the pantry opened, and Annie saw the big human look in and see her. She ran as quickly as she could to her tiny nest in the basement, and the human followed behind. She darted under the old milk crate, and as the human picked up the milk crate, she and her tiny family of tiny baby mice lay in the nest looking up at the huge human, thousands of times her size.

And I crushed them with my foot, because mice are vermin, and spread disease, and should be destroyed.