Writing and weeding March 8 2026
Writing prompt: Anthropomorphism: 20 minute writing session (unedited)
“Order! Order!” Magnus the mouse clapped his left paw hard onto the painted stone that decorated the Mouse Meeting Hall underneath the metal shipping container. He looked sternly at Mannie, the young mouse whose tail hung at an crooked angle, a remnant of his near miss with a shopping cart pushed by a drunken human late one night on the sidewalk. Mannie was still chattering to Mollie, the sweet young mouse whose mother Melanie had recently died inside one of the paper box traps in the gallery above.
“AHEM!” Magus stared hard at Mannie, who finally got the hint and stopped mid sentence, a wry grin on his face showing that he would defer ot Magnus but only because he wanted to – to impress Mollie with his civic-mindedness.
Mollie smiled meekly at Mannie, and lowered her eyes as Magnus’ glare turned to her.
Magnus could not be angry at Mollie though, whose grief was well known and the reason for her grief was the main point of the night’s meeting.
“We have got to do something about these murderous Humans,” Magnus said solemnly. A murmur of assent swept through the dark cavernous low-ceiling space. Darkness, of course, wasn’t a problem for the mice, whose eyesight allowed them to see clearly from the ambient streetlight that seeped through the lattice-metal work at the corners of the structure.
“Hear hear!” a tiny voice squeaked from the back of the room. It was Marnie, Melanie’s sister, clutching the piece of black rag that she’d held ever since Melanie’s death was discovered.
The five dozen assembled mice turned to look at her. Silence followed. Then –
“High time we did something. Everyone always complains and nothing is done,” she squeaked, her voice cracking with grief and grit.
“Hear hear!” cried another mouse, and then another.
Magnus smiled. Finally, it was time to do something. He had plans he had been thinking of for year, and kept them to himself, since anytime he’d even hinted at such a thing in the past, he was blown off, told he was crazy, “We can’t fight the man,” they would say.
But the time was now.