Clara rested her chin on her fists and looked outside. This summer was fantastic so far. The garden
was promising with the green of the grass and the trees, the red and yellow of the flowers and the
blue of the sky ever so slightly freckled with white.
Yet a good mood would not want to arise in her. It had been last year, when literally all her friends
moved out of town to study in several different university cities accross the country leaving her
alone.
Well, not entirely alone, she still had Jasper, her boyfriend, but living with your partner is hardly a
supstitude for a pack of real friends who hang around and talk, drink, smoke weed, etcetera. On top
of that, Jasper was out of the house.
He visited relatives in the south and on his way back he wanted to check in on some of their friends
who left the city. Now she regretted saying 'no' when he asked her to come with him but she
couldn't stand his stepmother, whom he was going to meet south, which was the reason for her
decline.
She filled the coffee pot with "fair trade" Espresso, put it on the stove and lazily flicked the radio on
as she returned to her seat. Normal people would have listened to music or an entertaining
documentation, but not so Jasper. He liked the "cultural report", a radio station that never played
music ever and instead aired non stop the most boring documentations that mankind has ever
brought forth occaisionally interrupted by an ever repeating news report every 30 minutes.
Realising she didn't change the channel she sighed but made no attempt to get up and change it.
"Might aswell find out if I can get any 'boreder'", she thought bitterly. On was a scientific report
about a pacific island that had only been dicovered a few years ago.
She remembered the initial news report from back then: It was a breakthrough in science, a
milestone for the theory of evolution. Not that any scientist that appeared in the report ever had
questioned evolution, no, but now there was absolute certainty, beyond a doubt. The amazing find
that was made on that island had been a new species of mice.
They would have had to get there by a boat, propably smugglers in the 18th century and being
isolated for so long, they evolved into a very odd apperance for mice: They actually looked like
people.
Now, they were taken to several labs in the US and across Europe to examine them further and it
turned out that their cognitive abilities were also far ahead those of regular mice. A fact most
evidently demonstrated by mass escapes of the species from several labs. This was how they got
introduced into daily human life.
Make no mistake, they where mice and by humans handled as such. You could buy them as pets
(allthough they were very high prized), you could find them in your garden and even sometimes
they would enter a human's house. In a house the little mice people where usually met with hostility,
just like regular mice usually where.
Traps, poison, cats and stomping feet meant to drive out the pest, although it was forbidden per
animal rights act to kill or torture them for plesure as some nut cases had allready done it with
regular mice years before. It also occured rarely that they got caught, an instant attributed to their
intelligence and swiftness.
Clara hadn't found any evidence of mice of any kind living in their house yet, nor did she know that
any of her friends had laid eyes upon a real one. Was that so? A collection of tiny dirt drops beneath
the sideboard caught her attention.
Moving closer, she identified it as mice excrement. She crouched down to peak under the furniture
when suddenly something from out of the dark made an unexpected move towards her. She
shrieked up and jumped backwards from her crouching position which sent her painfully falling
onto her butt.
There, across the floor darted...to call this thing a mouse was obviously wrong, it looked like a tiny
doll to her, not taller than 5 centimeters (~2 inches)...what ever it was, it was moving quickly and
made it's way through the kitchen door to the hall, taking a left right into the living room. In her
mind still phillosophising on how to characterrize this little thing Clara realized too late that it was
getting away.
Getting up to start a pursuit her left ear picked up the monotone voice of the speaker on that radio
documentation about the island. He said: "As scientists have recently discovered, mouse-people are
capable of speech and many of them have leanred human languages."
Her thoughts where racing, 'this could turn very interessting.'
Released from her boredom she began to pursue but when she got into the living wrong the little
mouse person was no where to be found.
Casually she checked under every piece of furniture in the living wroom. Smirking she scooped up
piles of books and clothes that lay on the ground. Although unsuccessfull in her pursuit the game of
hide and seek with a tiny, interessting creature entertained her.
Part of her wanted to find it right away but another part wanted to keep looking for it, see it, loose it
again, chase it, hunt it down until finally, exhausted and cornered the little thing would have to
surrender.
But what would she do with it and she had it? She sure didn't want mice in her house. They shat
everywhere, chewed on clothes, furniture and food alike and they nested and produced offspring in
piece-rate work.
Many questions crossed her mind, she feared that little bastard of a mouse man that she had seen
had brought his whole family here and soon they would dart all over the floor and crap everywhere
and laugh at her while she tried invain to catch them. Well, now that she knew that they could talk,
she'd try to catch it and talk to it.
She heard a rash behind the showcase by the TV and quickly went to shove it aside. To light came a
little hole in the wall, where the mouse man must have gotten through. Smirking she said: "Okay
little one, you win this time."
In the following days Clara went to tidy up the house. Since Jasper had left things had gotten a little
out of hand and chaos had marched in. Strangely, when she was bored and didn't know what to do,
she never felt like cleaning up, but when there was more important stuff to do, she usually went to
clean up the house first. 'it should be the other way around' she thought.
But in this instance, cleaning up the house went hand in hand with her new goal to fight off
boredom: Catching a little mouse-person. She found out, half to her disgrace and half to her bliss,
that there where propably many mouse people allready living in Jasper's and Clara's home, evident
by several coolections of mouse shit on the floor in different parts of the house and also upstairs.
3 days after the first contact with a mouse-man she found another one. In the evening, she was
gathering up dirty socks from the floor when suddenly from under a sock sped a tiny mouse...girl.
She could tell in was a girl by it's physical apperance: Wider hips, smaller shoulders and also long
brown hair, she, or rather 'it', looked also a bit smaller than the first one she'd seen.
Not letting herself get distracted by thoughts a second time she quickly but gently put her right foot
in its way. The little creature was going for the drawer, under there Clara would not be able to reach
it. However with a massive foot in the way the tiny thing scurried left to get under the bed. "No, you
don't", said Clara and again quickly but gently placed her foot, this time the left, into it's path.
To her suprise, the tiny woman stopped and looked at her foot. Clara took a moment to marvell at
the sight of such a tiny, trembling...person, next to her gargantuan foot. She crouched down to scoop
up the little thing before it would decide to run again but at the last moment the little mouse ducked
under her outstrechted palm and darted for the drawer with the aquarium on it.
Seeing her chance to catch it slip away, Clara quickly rose up and violently slammed her foot into
the wooden floor, merely 2 centimeters from the fleeing girl. The tiny thing shrieked loudly, threw
itself backwards and slid feet first into her socked foot.
There it was, the tiny fragile thing that Clara had so longed for to hold it in her grasp, lying on the
ground next to her foot, it's face burried in it's hands sobbing uncontrollably. Clara became
awkwardly aware of her power over this tiny thing.
It was a pleasure for her, to look for the littles, and the two times she now got to chasing them
where also quite fun to her but to them it was a fight for survival. They didn't know what would
happen to them if they got caught. And neither did Clara for that matter. Yet.