A Horror Story for The End of the World Chapter Two (Run, Little Mouse)

(Note this is chapter two. You might want to start at chapter one.)

Picking up where you left off can sometimes be more difficult than it seems. Especially when you haven’t really started and have no idea where you‘re going.

That’s the situation we could find ourselves in here. We’ve established the cigarette. But along the way, we’ve also put ourselves in a bit of a predicament, because as we just learned, the cigarette is burning.

Burning, but also we’ve learned that no one has been there for days. And as we all know, a cigarette has a specific lifetime. Or perhaps you could call it a death time. But that’s also not quite right, because while a cigarette exists in its pack, alongside a bunch of identical brothers and sisters, it really isn’t living, is it? It’s existing. Waiting for it’s opportunity to live.

The problem for the cigarette, however, is that it isn’t fulfilling its purpose until it’s being actively destroyed. Consumed by chemical reaction, leaving behind ash, while the vaporous waste becomes a delivery mechanism for a drug delivered straight to our lungs.

So as it burns, as it is destroyed, it fulfills its true purpose and only then truly lives.

This cigarette, though … it burns, but like the tree falling in the forest, it has no one around to smoke it.

It’s a sad state of affairs for this lonely cigarette. This cancer stick. This coffin nail.

It’s none of those things. Because, as it burns, it does so in silence, anonymity, and loneliness.

Someone lit it. Someone who doesn’t exist.

And those that don’t exist are what we call ghosts.

We are ghosts.

— -

Abandoned, but not dead.

A mouse scurries across the dirty floorboards, dodging the furballs that still remain from the cat who once called this palace home. It’s tread these paths through such repetition that it can navigate with its eyes closed and a clothespin pinching its nose shut.

If such a small clothespin exists. Which it likely doesn’t. And this mouse isn’t wearing a clothespin anyway.

It’s more a way to creatively get across the point that this mouse knew this house. And this is important not to set the stage for a story about the adventures of a Mighty Mouse™. It matters, because we’re further confirming that this place has been abandoned for some time.

Abandoned so long, in fact, that the mouse is considering moving on. Moving out. Moving up. Maybe to the East Side.

The mouse doesn’t know.

He doesn’t even have a compass.

But what he does know is that the food here has run out and the room is filling with smoke.

Stick around much longer and he’ll be sticking around forever.

So what does the mouse do? He leaves. Absconds. Ditches the joint.

Bails. Not like hay … but hey, now’s the time to skedaddle.

And so he does. Across the floorboards, through the dusty gap between the front door and the threshold. Claws clattering like tiny matchsticks against dried wood.

Move too fast and you might start a fire, little mouse.

Where there’s smoke, there’s fire. And you know that, little mouse. That’s why you’re out. No food. Smoke. Death.

A cigarette lit by a ghost and left to burn in a black and white noir kitchen from a Charles Laughton movie. The one he never made but could have in another time and another place.

Under the door. Down the hallway. Past darkened doorways, darting in and out of light and shadows cast by the few remaining functional lightbulbs.

As the smoke gives chase.

Through splinters of glass. Tiny footprints left behind in powdered mercury.

To the stairs. Down the steps.

The smoke creeps closer. Reaches the edge of the staircase. Flows like souls of ice. Down one step. Then another.

Little mouse isn’t looking for food any more.

Little mouse isn’t looking for a new place to hang his tiny little mouse hat.

Not a place for a mouse wife and a mouse family and a mouse mortgage and a mouse 401k and a mouse home equity line of credit.

No, Little Mouse just wants to live.

The thing is, Little Mouse isn’t afraid of choking on the smoke.

What scares him most isn’t even who lit the cigarette in the first place.

Maybe that doesn’t matter.

What does matter is what hides in the smoke.

Little Mouse, his claws slip as they try to grip the tiles of the building entryway. They slip, but he adjusts, and keeps moving.

No treadmills for Little Mouse.

No revolving doors.

No doors at all.

Through the broken entryway. Down the rain-soaked concrete steps. Beneath the moon and in the damp stink of the night.

Free. Safe again.

Off to find another meal and another place to hang his sombrero.

All clear ahead.

He looks to the right, and all he sees is more freedom.

He looks to his left. Just to be sure.

And his world goes black as he hears his own skull crack under the heel of a size 12 workboot.

His world goes black. But only for a moment.

Because after that moment, his world ceases to exist.

The man running down the street — the one with mouse stuck to the bottom of his boot — he doesn’t stop running. Doesn’t even pause. There’s no time for that.

Because just like Little Mouse, he too is being chased.

And if he isn’t careful, he’s gonna get crushed too.

TO BE CONTINUED.