Story time (Cafas)

The mouse
who used to be a boy
was ticked.

His tail arced out in a vicious half-moon behind him: four paws braced on the ground as he was swatted—nay, shooed—from his rightfully stolen prey.

The mouse
who used to be a boy
had woken up on the wrong side of the bed.

Earlier that morning, somewhere in the Mansion, an orange and cream tomcat had woken up on a certain young girl’s bed. Let’s not name names. He’d given a luxuriant stretch and a yawn, quite content with life: finally, finally he felt it. In the back of his mind. His powers were finally rested, after their overuse at the brawl. Most excellent. The cat readied the familiar shift in its mind: just a few heartworms; just as a bit of extra durability. The cat had stood up with a pleasant arc of its back, and

knocked itself unconscious.

Here and now, this white-eyed punk was going to pay for that cellphone. Pay in sweat, blood, and mice.

The mouse
who used to be a boy
dodged in low,

and

ran up the inside
of the teenager’s
left pant leg.

Slaps were dodged like artillery shells
In a charge
Between trenches lines

The gray mouse soldiered on: upwards and upwards, its small claws scritching for purchase into cloth and flesh, as indiscriminately as in any warfare.

That morning, the cat had woken up with a headache. A pounding headache, the likes of which it had only felt when it had been hung over (...and also a cat). Okay. So, apparently, its splintering was still offline. Good to know. Or was that just a fluk—?

The cat
was unconscious
again.

A fleshy intruder entered the mouse’s realm. It shoved aside cloth to create room for its gargantuan form; its five knobby tentacles writhed. The mouse’s small whiskers quivered. There was nothing for it. Bravely, it dodged around the back of the teenager’s thigh,

whispered a soft furry disturbance under the edge of his boxers,

and came around above the war machine.

The wrist was delivered a most mighty nip, befitting of a warrior mouse.

The giant had fallen.

The mouse’s entire world shook, and fell to the ground; seismic groans rattled through its skeleton. It closed its black eyes and dug in as the world came tumbling down: that was all it could do.

And then it was over.
And the cell phone
was exposed.

He saw this, of course, through that sublime gap between the teenager’s body and his waistband. Nose and whiskers emerged first, both quivering; small eyes, then the spring! of ears unfolding after several hundred heartbeats of dark confinement. A minor eternity had passed, lived within the teenager’s pants.

Two paws, then four: the tail slid out last, unsheathing with the quiet sound of victory. A bulky man-arm became the conquering quadruped’s ramp to his prize, justly restored. He wrapped his forepaws around the cell phone, and started—again—the laborious process of dragging it into the shadows.

The teenager
unwisely
clung on.

Now on an even eye level with his fallen foe, the mouse did the only mature thing a mammal could do: lifting up one paw, he slowly—so slowly—curled back all of his fingers. All save one.

Interspecies
non-verbal
communication.

A beautiful miracle of nature.

A step further, propelled the big man
who had to threatened mice
with knives.

Several hours ago, Calley would have sworn his day couldn’t get worse. Splintering: offline. Check. (And double-checked.) Chimeraing... also offline. That made sense for some forms: Luke had killed the puma that he used in his griffin form, for instance. But nothin’ much had happened to his manticore, and that seemed broken, as well.

Most disturbingly,
he couldn’t find
his octopus.

The shelves of the clutter were barren.

And this punk with the changing eyes was walking away from the little mouse. Limping, more like it. That’s right. Keep going, unless you wanted more of this: you don’t mess with a mouse, not in his house. He was a house mouse.

The jerk was taking the mouse’s cell phone with him, though. And that, friends? That simply would not—

>> "You're just lucky that I'm having a good day buddy, or you'd be dead right now."

—Oh. Oh, it was back on.

As the kid took an overconfident step forward, the mouse skittered on silent gray paws towards a trash bag by the alley’s mouth. Yellow cord tied it shut. Yellow cord, with a hanging string.

Bite.
Skitter.
Tripwire.

Friends, it might be appropriate to suspect that this was no normal mouse.

The boy
who used to be a mouse
pressed himself against the alleyway wall. Again.

There were cats at the Mansion. There were dogs in the streets. There were hawks in the city, and canvas overhangs above Italian bistro shops. There were tall, scowling men with large, black briefcases who slammed down their phones, and started yelling at waitresses. There were mice who were petty thieves. And that, friends, is precisely what our story is about.

Calley had tried one of the few remaining forms he had, suddenly unsure if that would even work. There was great relief when he found himself in the form of the little gray mouse. Katrina always left her door open; a courtesy to habitual quadrupeds such as himself. As the gray mouse looked up and it observed a cat

observing it.

Not a problem. Since his basic shifts were still working, he only had to—

--Urk. How did that shifting thing work, again? ‘Cause it wasn’t. Working.

Never before had he been on the receiving end of a playful cat’s malicious attacks. So. Much. Batting. So much dragging, proudly. So much being shoved inside of people’s shoes, then happily chased just when he thought it was safe to run and escaping outside and there was a dog—yes. A dog: salvation. The cat hissed to a stop. The mouse skittered to safety, between two large paws. The dog sniffed friendly.

And then picked him up
in the most undignified manner.
Unmouth mine tail, fiend.

Carrying, carrying, and so much pendulum swinging followed. Eventually, dizzily, he was abandoned for the shaking of a food bag. He twitchingly climbed his way back to his paw—





Thus did the mouse arrive at the city. On the ledge, above the Italian bistro. The hawk had smiled at its prey as it comfortably settled its wings: pre-meal preparations. It didn’t possess facial muscles, but having been one on many occasion, the mouse quite recognized the expression.

An unmouselike action: sinking teeth
deeply
into that sensitive spot right below the knee.

Having been a hawk, the mouse knew right where that was, too. The resulting scream of rage was quite fantastic. The resulting fall towards the pavement? Less so.

Divine
Cloth overhang
Intervention.

And that is how the mouse landed, after a gentle roll,
into the half-eaten pasta of the tall scowling man below,
who turned to yell at the waitress,

while the mouse climbed out,
knocked his cell phone off the table,
and stole it.

The alleyway wasn’t far. And the scowling man had finally realized his loss. Fortunately, the mouse had a bipedal scapegoat.

“You,” the tall, scowling man growled at the teenager. “You picked the wrong man to steal from. I’m not having a good day, punk.”

And that is the story of how a mouse
who used to be a boy
stole a cell phone.

On with the show.

Clark.
Clark worked at a stationary supply company.
Clark was having a bad day.

(Clark.)
(Clark dreamed of being a mutant when he was little.)
(Clark briefly considered changing his last name to ‘Kent’ during the sixth grade, by why of wishful thinking.)

Clark.
Clark had a new intern, named Tim.
Clark’s new intern didn’t understand orders of magnitude, apparently.

Tim.
Tim had ordered 1000 packages of paper for Jacobs & Jacobs Security.
Tim had written 10000 on the order form.

Clark.
Clark’s department hand single-handedly flooded the Jacobs & Jacobs lobby with paper.

Because Tim
had put
their main office address down
as opposed to
their warehouse.

Clark.
Clark had been getting unhappy calls all day.
Clark was unhappy, himself, because

Clark had not grown up to be superman.
Clark had grown up to work at a stationary supply company.
Clark could not leap tall buildings in a single bound. (But he was good at filing.)

Clark was only a penmancer.

“You have ten seconds,” Clark said, “to give me back,” taking a ball point pen out of the ink protector in right breast pocket, “my **** phone.”