Michelle Thomson
U3110524
Topic 2: workshop
500 words on any theme.
Word count: 517
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MOUSE.
She was heading outside. She carried a large white piece of cardboard with an upturned
red bucket on top of it. A little mouse was being transported to the outside world.
Determined to see it set free and run gleefully into nature, I followed.
Standing in the frozen wintry, pale sunshine I stood still, daring not to disturb the mouse
freeing process. She lowered the cardboard to the grass. The red bucket was lifted. I did
not observe a scurrying mouse…but a chubby little fellow with a tiny tail who turned his
small face, whiskers and round deep eyes to look up at us sincerely confused. He did not
know what was going on. He was very small and round. A baby perhaps. He would not
go. She tipped the cardboard up on a further angle to try to tip him off…
mouse refused to budge.
It now became apparent why he hadn’t moved…the sides of his little body contracted
violently and I understood that he was doomed. Usually mice scurry away at the sight of
humans. In mouse’s last moments, he only looked to us for help. Pleading is what I saw
in his eyes. Silent, deep longing for a way out of his suffering. A suffering that most of us
will never experience or understand until our final hour looms mercilessly before us.
We were powerless. The boss now even was yelling for us to return to work. Poison had
already taken it’s toll. I looked into mouse’s sweet face, knowing he was finished. She
got a piece of plastic rubbish from nearby and pushed him off the cardboard. He fell into
the grass. Whilst his little body spasms shook his entire being, he still managed to turn
around, shakily and lift his head up in our direction in a last plea for us to do something.
Again his sides contracted causing him immense pain. I felt ill, wretched. Why did I not
have the power to help save this creature! Swaying back and forth slightly, beginning to
loose his balance, mouse managed to stretch out one small paw and just grab a blade of
grass. There he steadied himself, whilst a shocking spasm shook and jerked his little torso
once more.
Finally a look came over his face, for he must of read the sad despair in ours that we
could not save him. The lethal dose was making it’s final impact. I read in his eyes an
acknowledgement that it was all over. Mouse turned his head and headed slowly, face
down into the grass. In his exhausted state he only managed to sink deep enough so that
his small, round mousy rump remained visible.
There he rested. There he expired.
Something expired in me at the same time. It was my faith in the human race. Despair.
Collectively we are, as a species, completely written off. Should the human being had
become extinct a long time ago, then the suffering they have caused each other and the
living creatures which they have taken for granted, would also have been avoided.
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