by Laura Bernardeschi Nelson
Upon their return from the ill-fated journey to Nowhere, a subtle yet dangerous crack appeared in the damp foundations of the Great Stone Burrow.
Their brief exposure to the outside world, the unbearable sight of the Vixens happily eating ice creams beneath the warm sun, and, above all, the impossible vision of the colossal marble middle finger reaching triumphantly toward the sky had begun to scrape away at the dull, obedient minds of several rodents. For the first time in their mechanical, colourless lives, a few of them found themselves wondering whether there was any real purpose to their existence.
Only the Rhinoceros and the Hippopotamus returned to their desks in visibly cheerful spirits. They settled into their chairs with exaggerated satisfaction, puffing themselves up with self-importance, convinced they were the unquestioned rulers of their tiny kingdom of desks and filing cabinets.
The Mantis, meanwhile, delighted to have escaped the rigid discipline imposed during the expedition, quietly resumed her favourite posture. She folded her razor-sharp forelegs together as though in perpetual prayer, silently passing judgement on everyone unfortunate enough to cross her path.
Madame Bulk noticed the first faint tremors of rebellion spreading beneath the surface. Towering above the office like a mountain of stale polyester, her mind consumed by malice, envy and an insatiable obsession with increasing production, she immediately summoned an emergency meeting.
The atmosphere inside the Burrow thickened with anxiety.
To restore absolute fear and unquestioned obedience, Madame Bulk devised yet another grotesquely absurd demonstration of authority.
She called it The Great Separation.
Until that day, the words rat and mouse had been used interchangeably throughout the Kingdom. Nobody had ever cared which term was used, nor had anyone taken offence at being called one instead of the other. They were all equally grey creatures, dragging their long, naked tails through the endless stone corridors, producing the same monotonous whisper:
shhh… shhh… shhh…
Madame Bulk saw an opportunity where no one else saw anything at all.
From that moment onward, every rodent would be officially classified as either a Rat or a Mouse, according to one single criterion: the precise length of its tail.
The measurements began immediately.
The rodents were ordered into a long queue before the Mantis, who stood waiting with an old rusted steel ruler clutched between her forelegs. Biology no longer mattered. Species itself had become nothing more than a number, arbitrarily dictated by the will of the polyester mountain.
The Rhinoceros and the Hippopotamus embraced their new executive responsibilities with childish enthusiasm. Lumbering clumsily along the lines, they slapped newly printed plastic badges onto the collars of each subordinate rodent, taking obvious pleasure in their borrowed authority.
Read more: The Day Trip to Nowhere – Part III: The Tail-Measuring Decree and the Hippopotamus’s ResetThis is just the beginning of the journey. Find out what happens next and unlock the full story by grabbing your copy of the book The Grey Reign
© Laura Bernardeschi Nelson
All characters and events in these stories are entirely imaginary. All rights reserved © Laura Bernardeschi Nelson.