Thursday, February 24, 2011

Remainder, Part III

This photo is used under a Creative Commons license.

Brave mouse. Theeg had decided that's what he was long before he took the position of guard. Almost brave mouse. That's how he felt. If curiosity killed the cat, however, it could most likely pulverize a mouse. That cylinder didn't seem to be too menacing, so Theeg crawled out of the tunnel and sat next to the hole, opposite this new stranger. "Curious markings," Theeg said to himself as he plunked his thimble-sized butt down on the snow, trailing his tail out behind him. "No legs, but I suppose it can roll around easily enough." He tried to make out the letters printed on its side. (Mice can read just about as well as humans can. Pinnicus, who was a dear friend to the Bard until the friendship was broken when Shakespeare stole a play that Pinnicus had penned and billed it as his own Taming of the Shrew. He changed enough details to cast only shadows of suspicion; replacing the weasels with knights and the frightful, thumb-sized shrew with a woman with big bosoms. Who, again could forget Louis Kaurol de la Dormousse, a Frenchmouse whose friendship with a jovial English mathematician led to a literary partnership so fruitful they decided to share names.)

Theeg, working out the "udweis" on the side of the cylinder, was no Ember Ellen Poot, that gloomy female mouse and author of horrid little stories, but in all he did feel that he had encountered a rather mysterious object worthy of a tale. On this bright but cold day, the cylinder was warm and smelled of wet rotten tumbleweeds.

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