My Only Friend, The End . . .

 

This is Big Blue, lord of Diatoms. It speaks for itself.

Albert, thanx for the kind words. You know how to cheer an old graybeard. I've been fortifying myself with massive quantities of sucrose and caffeine, so I'm feeling more myself today. Perhaps because of the infection, I've lately been to the South Pole much more often than the North Pole.

It's difficult for me to be entertaining on a daily basis, more so than for other journalistes, for reasons I explained yesterday. Maybe for the nonce I'll print such chapters of my aborted novel as I deem fit for reader consumption; that was, after all, the original purpose of this journal. If you bother to read them, keep in mind that it is barely literature; it was meant to be an entertainment for some of my nieces and nephews.

 

You may have seen this before; it's one of my mice, and the heroine of the story.

This is the laughably titled "author's note"; it will do for now.

This story was told to me by a mouse. Not one of my mice, certainly; my mice don't talk - not to me, anyway. Amongst themselves, they may be discussing the Grand Unified Theory of Everything, for all I know, but if so, they haven't seen fit to share it with me. They do communicate, with eyes and subtle gestures; they'll stare at the food dish or water bowl and then at me as if to say, "Why isn't this full? What's the deal, clown? Get up off your fat ass and fix this!"

Nevertheless, I'm reasonably sure that some mouse, somewhere, felt the need to communicate this story to someone and I was tuned to the right frequency ("What's the frequency, Kenneth?" Damned if I know. Dan Rather didn't either.) This mouse, wherever she may be, dictated the story to me pretty much the way you see it. If I tried to take too many liberties or aim the story in a direction of my own choosing, she stopped narrating and I didn't have anything to write down until I began listening once again. ("That's not the way it goes! What's the deal, clown? Sit down on your fat ass and fix this!") Mice can be irreverent.

Anyway, this story appeared one day, just as it begins, and was told to me  just as you will read it, if you care to. I liked it; I hope you will too.

Recommended reading - Elizabeth Peters . . . the Brother Cadfael novels

What I'm reading now - "Blood on the Street" by Charles Gasparino

Peace.

Content copyright Malcolm Mott 2005