I was then thirteen, and she was eleven. We were alone at home for a couple of hours; Mom and Dad were both out teaching. So we devised a bit of a game, prompted by my new bed, which looked like a throne. I was the Queen of the World. Unfortunately, Mom trusts my younger sister more than me, so by parental designation she was the Queen of the World's Baby Sitter.
I gave her royal permission to make some instant pudding, after Jenny told me I would get some brownie points if I did. I was in desperate need of brownie points, having just acquired twenty-six doghouse points in a row. First, I let her parakeet, Lucky, loose in her room, and upset both the hamster cages. I like Silly, Sparky, and Bambino. I just wanted to play with them.
Jenny and I put the powdered pudding in a bowl and a small amount of milk, then mixed it up so we had a green glop. We wondered about that, since both pistachio pudding powder and milk are white. I offered to do it for my next science fair project. Then we put the rest of the milk in, and had trouble stirring the green glop up.
"Look; I found the green glop on the bottom!"
"I ate it first."
"Well, I found it first for me; kind of like Columbus and the New World."
"You mean searching for something else, and finding the wrong thing?"
"No. He found it first for the Europeans, and I found it first for me. You found it first for both of us, and. . . . Who found it first for the world? The aborigines, or various plants and animals?"
"The green glop at the bottom?"
"And didn't bacteria come before the plants? What was the first living organism on this planet?"
"They were always there."
"Yes, Pangaea, isn't it?"
"No one found it first for the world. The world already knew it was there."
"When did you learn that you had a heart?"
"You see the world's a lot smarter than us. We have brains."
"If the world is so much smarter than us, why did it bring us here in the first place?"
"Beats me."
I was so fascinated by this dialogue that I promptly went to the computer to record it accurately. I gave it an introduction to explain what had been happening, entitled it Primordial Ooze, and turned it in to my Composition 1 class for an 'A' grade. Then I forgot about it for a year or more.
My fourteenth birthday passed by, and I was three years older than Jenny again. My sister liked playing imagination games less and less, even when she got to be more powerful than the queen of the world. I played with my mice, and their numbers fluxed, sometimes reaching as many as a hundred in the cage complex. They earned their keep, because I sold them to the local pet store, and bought food, litter, and exercise wheels for them. I tried not to think of what happened to them; many people owned snakes in Claremont. The female mice had a tendency to give birth to at least eighteen pinkies each every month. As a professional mouse breeder, I won prizes in local mouse shows for best pet mouse, best satin coat, and best spotted coat. My favorite mice died over time. Black Cherry, my very first mouse, had died after two months. I loved her for those two months.
Over the six years that I kept pet mice, I must have buried two thousand beneath my rock garden in the front lawn. They still haunt me, whether I am near them or not. My rock collection is all packed up, now.
The three I remember best, I had at the same time. Francis won six ribbons. He had a gorgeous satin coat, white, with five precisely placed chocolate brown spots. His eyes were ruby, so dark as to seem black. He broke his back twice and recovered. He would sneak out of his cage and sleep on my pillow beside me. He was the son of William Shakespeare 'Shakey' Harlequin Mouse and Amy Harlequin Mouse. He snuck out of his cage once, and never returned.
Mithril and Goldenrod were my silver and gold. Mithril's color was called lilac by mouse breeders, but she gleamed just like the legendary dwarven silver of Tolkien's famous trilogy. Her eyes were pink. She left me in the night. After I stayed up with her during the small hours, agonizing with each of the hundreds of breaths she took each second, I buried her without my parent's knowledge.
Goldenrod was a faun colored mouse, but her fur was the brightest orange I had ever seen. Mouse breeders paid me as much as ten dollars for her offspring, hoping to reproduce her long-haired glitter. Her whiskers tickled silkily when she nuzzled my cheek. She died of a tumor while I was locked away in a mental institution the third time. They let my family bring her inside against rules, so I saw her one last time. I didn't get to be there when she was buried.
Mes pauvres souris! My poor mice! How can I give so many hundreds their fair mourning, when so many were never even named? So I simply dream of a room with thousands of mice, crawling all over me. Their soft belly fur rubs my arms, their whiskers nuzzle me, their claws prick my skin. None of them are ever sick, and none disappear. I never have to sell any, and there is always enough room, and they all have their fill of sunflower seeds.
High school took up more and more of my life. I finally got in the habit of doing my homework on time, although not all of it. I had less time for my mice, and stopped entering them in shows. There was less opportunity to read and write for anything but school assignments, and I practiced magic rituals less often. I talked more, although I was still considered quiet. More opportunities to travel came, and discovered that I liked it. I was fluent in French and I began to learn Russian. Music became more and more a part of my life. If I am asked what I like, I still say, "Music, magic, mice, reading, writing, and travel," but I no longer keep mice as pets. Instead, I have a cat, and he hasn't died yet.
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