1646. Gail’s pets

Gail loved animals, which is why she had so many pets. She had a cat and a dog, a canary and a cockatoo, a couple of ducks, a rabbit and a guinea pig and three mice. They would all run around together, except for the canary of course. The canary couldn’t run around but Gail often let it fly freely around the house provided the windows and doors were shut. And could it sing? My word! What a diva on a sunny day!

Then one day she couldn’t hear it singing. Had it perhaps escaped? Gail checked the windows and doors. Everything was closed, but it must have found an escape route somewhere. Gail opened the house up and left the canary’s cage door wide. Hopefully it would fly back.

It was quite a while after – Gail wasn’t exactly the best of housekeepers – when she was vacuuming under the dining room table that she noticed a few yellow tail feathers and a bird’s clawed foot.

By the end of the year the dog had got the ducks, and the cat had got the cockatoo, the rabbit, the guinea pig, and the three mice.

Gail still loved animals, and continued to pamper her cat and her dog. She replaced her deceased pets with a budgerigar and a cockatiel, a couple of chickens, a hamster and a rat and three gerbils.

These days Gail has a cat and a dog, and has taken up origami as an interest.

1286. Nice portraits of mice

When Mitchell stood up straight from weeding the garden, he accidentally hit his head on a plank that the house painters had placed between two ladders. It was quite a severe knock and Mitchell had concussion. He spent three days in hospital before returning home.

What amazed people, including specialists, was that the accident seemed to have activated a section of his brain hitherto dormant. Suddenly Mitchell discovered he could paint pictures of cute field mice; field mice in a corn field; field mice eating cheese; field mice taunting cats. He even painted a delightfully intricate picture of a mouse flying a de Havilland Tiger Moth aircraft! These paintings sold for hefty prices; so hefty in fact that Mitchell and his wife were able to purchase a house free from debt.

“They’re not simply pictures of mice,” said the curator of the city museum, “it’s the thought processes behind it. Mitchell is able to convey feelings of beauty, insignificance, aloneness, grandeur. Even the sky above the mice conveys varying deep emotions. With one knock on the head he is able to portray scenes of incomparable exquisiteness.”

Unfortunately, Mitchell drove his wife to drink. He was totally nuts.

1057. A precious thing

Natalie had a precious procession. She kept it in a cupboard and rarely looked at it. In fact she saw it only when she went to that cupboard to get her silver teapot if a special visitor called for a cup of tea.

Her precious thing was a little exercise wheel for a pet mouse. The mouse had long gone, but she kept the wheel. It was plastic, and green. She’d had it since she was a little girl, when her pet mouse, Frederick, used to run around and around the wheel. He loved it!

And then a real live wild mouse came into the pantry and Frederick escape and got caught in the mouse trap Natalie’s father had set.

WHOOMPH! Natalie could still hear the sound. WHOOMPH! She knew the trap was there, but she didn’t know that Frederick had escaped his cage. Nothing would replace Frederick. The WHOOMPH! in her head stopped her from ever getting another pet.

Natalie was now ninety-four. She took out the little exercise wheel and looked at it. How different things might have been if there had been no WHOOMPH! She had never married. She had never done much with her life. The silver teapot in the cupboard hadn’t been used for years. In fact, she had become the little mouse running in circles of shyness.