Cat and Mouse

But she felt so safe.  Nestled in the warm fur of his belly, listening to him purr himself to sleep.  The deep, distant thunder of his purr, and below the fur, the lightning bolt of a scar that crossed his body.  Sometimes she'd wake in the night, thinking the earth was trembling, or that the humans were driving their big machines down the road - but it was only his muscles twitching, and she would watch his paws jerking unsteadily, as if he were running in quicksand.  He never woke from such dreams, only drifting deeper into sleep - as if, she thought, he could land on all fours, even in the world of dreams.

The other mice would have nothing to do with her.  At first, she had tried to keep it from her mother and her sisters and brothers.  But you cannot hide the smell of a cat, certainly not from a widowed mouse.  And you cannot hide the aura of love:  it crawls inside you and compels its ways upon you.  You do not merely surrender to its sickly ecstasy, no, you throw yourself upon it.  And so you have no choice at all, no choice but to spend every idle moment brushing your eyelashes with your paws, preening your whiskers and sitting in the most dangerous alleys, trying to look coy and innocent, trying to pretend you don't know any better.

Finally it was too much.  Unable to bear her mother's look of bewildered disgust, her brothers' muttered curses, and her sisters' stone silence, she looked up over the bread crust, begging for understanding.  "He's different," she pleaded once, helplessly.  And her mother had simply gazed back and said, "You were one too many.  I should have eaten you."
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