The Museum Mouse Makes a Request

It's the most inspiring place to be a mouse, especially scenes like looking down on the huge whale skeleton.  I mean, all the stuffed mammals and birds and insects are a bit weird sometimes.  The dinosaurs are cool, though. And the bit with the earthquake simulator. 

And it got us all thinking. So, beyond the skirting boards we started to make our own museum. We've a gallery of lost change featuring coins from all around the world. A giant nest made of dropped tissues. A history of cheeses selected from the cafe down the years. An exhibition of lost single gloves.  All under a roof of umbrellas in a forgotten space.

With the people gone, though, for most of the year (and far fewer when they did return), we've been stuck for ways to expand. 

So please, we are begging, for our own sanity, please send us human things. We need your weird stuff to keep us entertained.

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Written for Flash! Friday from the following picture prompt (we were also asked to add a Fire Element (include a non-human character) or Ice Element (include a phrase in another language (non-English))) and had a word count limit of 150-160 words.  

“Hope.” Blue Whale. Natural History Museum, London. Photo by just-pics.

Back then I thought I could solve everything

They say that out here are spirits from prehistoric times. There’s certainly little else. And rarely people. So when a naked body is found stretched out under their art, we start to wonder if they were involved.

And there it was, laid out as if a sacrifice to the stars. Certainly not for the lighting rigs and teams of police carefully combing the area for clues. Anything that would back up what she could tell us herself.

“Detective, she’s ready,” someone said.

I approached her spirit as it floated above its former home, introduced and explained myself before asking, “Did you see who did this to you?”

We couldn’t understand her answer. It was a language none of us understood.

And that was when they came to reclaim her.

Stone Age people surrounded us, approached her, picked up the body and took it away.

We packed up and went home none the wiser. My first unexplained case.

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Written for Flash! Friday from the following picture prompt (we were also asked to write outside of our usual genre - I went for Supernatural Crime) and had a word count limit of 150-160 Words.  

“Eternal Procession” . CC4 photo by Marc Toso, Ancient Skys Photography.  Read about Bears Ears (“Shash Jaá”)’s current political troubles here.

160 Words: The Pause

She leaned in and said, “Come here, Blessings, my child.  The Orisa are all with you this day.  None more so than Eshu.”  She pulled back and fixed me with an unknowable stare.  

My mother has always been known as the trickster in our family and it’s just like her to offer such a mysterious blessing.  Eshu, often mistranslated as satan for so long, is himself a trickster, but also a teacher, instructor, leader.  He has positive and negative energies.

Knowing my mother didn’t entirely approve of Tzain, I worried that she meant to curse us, to send me to his home full of concern.  That pause consumed me whole and took me so far from the bliss I’d been feeling that, before she broke it, I could see how both sides of the coin could benefit.  

“But only the good parts,” she concluded as her face broke in the biggest, cheekiest, smile, and I returned to the bliss renewed.

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Written for Flash! Friday from the following picture prompt (we were also asked to add a Fire Element (include a mysterious blessing) or Ice Element (include a mysterious curse)) and had a word count limit of 150-160 Words.  

A Yoruba bride and mother. Photo by Fhadekhemmy

Frozen Air

In a dinghy under the sheer cliffs of a glacier we searched for survivors.  We all pointed at the holes, planned searches of the ice caves.  Never did we think that it was in the air itself.

My crew all went in the same way, one by one.  First their eyes would freeze, their stares fixed into the distance as their screams began.  Then their noses would fill with ice, their lips would harden, crack and then break before the frost worked along their tongue, changing their screams into something more horrible as its edge deadened and it went flat.  Finally their throats were closed and the screaming ended alongside their life.  Before their bodies rested lifeless, all this ice thawed and evaporated as if never there.

Once only I remained, my ear turned cold and I heard them. 

A cold, hard whisper chilled me to my core and told me to leave.  “We are here now.  Never return.”  

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Written for Flash! Friday from the following picture prompt (we were also asked to add a Fire Element  (include something in the air) or Ice Element (include something in the water)) and had a word count limit of 150-160 Words:

“Arena Glacier” Antarctic Peninsula. CC3.0 photo by Godot13