Once upon a time, there lived a very small mouse in a very large house. Well, at least the mouse seemed very small and the house seemed very large. Perhaps the house thought itself to be small and the mouse thought herself to be large. We won’t ever know, because neither the house nor the mouse could speak. What we do know, for sure, because it’s carved into the stones on the Wall of Remembering, is that the story begins on the day that the mouse first left the house.
You see, when you’re a mouse, you would never have a reason to leave the house, no matter if it’s large or small. The house has lots of food to pilfer, lots of cellulose-based stuffs that you can shred up and snuggle down in, and, of course, there are almost no things that want to kill you, which is a major problem for mice that do not live in houses. But once in a while, a mouse is born who looks toward the sky--and only sees the ceiling, with its knubbly paint and cracked wainscoting. The fact that wainscoting is mentioned along with the ceiling just tells you how far down a mouse’s perspective is. Our Mouse Who Left the House is just such a mouse--a Mouse Who Looks at the Sky, but, as the Wall of Remembering tells us, she was also a Mouse Who Wanted More.
And so the little mouse scampered into the pantry because even Mice Who Want More generally start out with a little rummaging and raiding before their adventure begins. They are, after all, still mice, through and through. The little mouse stuffed her cheek pouches with shreds of popcorn kernels and a smidgen of semi-sweet chocolate chips, just for dessert. It might be some time before she got another bite of chocolate.
Then, with cheek pouches stuffed to an elegant, sigmoid curvature, the little mouse trundled beneath the kitchen sink and squeezed herself through the hole by the drainpipe and dropped into the ginormous cavern that was the Space Between Walls, that liminal zone that belongs in theory to the house, but in practice to the mouse. She scurried down a bouquet of electrical wiring and landed on the warmth of the furnace duct. It made a hollow thumping sound and the reverberations vibrated her feet in an energy that felt more like desire than fear. It tickled the house a little, but the house didn’t mind. The mouse loped on by, ever further from the drey where she was born and ever closer to the Sky.
The duct ended near the stonework foundation that kept the house from packing up and leaving, too, although the house mostly didn’t mind and, in fact, usually actually liked the granite embrace. You see, as much as we admire a Mouse Who Wants More, we could never continue on if we had a House Who Packed Up and Left. The mouse swallowed a morsel of chocolate to make her cheek pouch a tad less gravid and flattened herself down to squish through the tiny aperture where the stonework foundation met the plumbing intake. First was her nose, then her tiny front paws, then her plump abdomen, then her grey-pink tail. The house breathed a warm blessing of crawl-space air behind the mouse. Then the house was behind and the sky was before.
The little mouse looked at the sky and, for once, she didn’t want more.
©2020 by Jessie Hanson. All rights reserved.