Lumiere
09-04-2010, 09:41 PM
Very distressed, I went walking.
In my path was a mouse, dying, or else something like it. I stopped and bent over its curled body. Shallow breathing and fluttering eye-lids made me think it was suffering from the heat, so I found an old pop-can, submerged it in a nearby stream, and trickled water into a pool around its head. No reaction; just the same ballooning breath at intervals. Then stillness. I must have tied up my own distress with this mouse who I was powerless to help, because I began to cry.
Then a voice: thin and barely audible, as if spoken through a chilled blade of grass,
"Excuse me."
I straightened up and stopped crying with united swiftness. "Yes?"
(A human will persist in normal behavior even in un-normal situations. I knew what I had heard; I also knew I was alone; these two understandings didn't seem to oppose each other. I was under a sudden jungle-awareness.)
"Excuse me. If you could please move along . . . we're shooting."
I spun. Shooting. My instinct was to take flight, but the ground was closer; I toppled, catching myself on my hands, my face over the mouse's eye.
From the grass-blade voice: "Jesus Christ."
I up and spun. With my jungle-awareness, it took a half-minute's mental back-tracking to grasp that the pronunciation "Jesus Christ" had matched the movement of the mouse's mouth.
"Please. We're filming."
Behind a clump of grass, a party of mice with micro cameras and tech-sets, looking at me wearily. There was a quiet stirring in the area around my feet as The Mouse Who Had Been Dead got up and gave me a nasty look.
The director was not unkind about sending me away, but I felt extremely silly and - an overreaction, maybe - depressed. For five days I kept to my house. Twice in those five days came a knocking on the storm door, but having descended into a temporary benign madness, I could only call,
"We're filming!" and cachinnate.
I am recovered, but remnants of the madness cling; when nervous, I continue to say "we're filming".
This has lead to some unforeseen developments in my life.
In my path was a mouse, dying, or else something like it. I stopped and bent over its curled body. Shallow breathing and fluttering eye-lids made me think it was suffering from the heat, so I found an old pop-can, submerged it in a nearby stream, and trickled water into a pool around its head. No reaction; just the same ballooning breath at intervals. Then stillness. I must have tied up my own distress with this mouse who I was powerless to help, because I began to cry.
Then a voice: thin and barely audible, as if spoken through a chilled blade of grass,
"Excuse me."
I straightened up and stopped crying with united swiftness. "Yes?"
(A human will persist in normal behavior even in un-normal situations. I knew what I had heard; I also knew I was alone; these two understandings didn't seem to oppose each other. I was under a sudden jungle-awareness.)
"Excuse me. If you could please move along . . . we're shooting."
I spun. Shooting. My instinct was to take flight, but the ground was closer; I toppled, catching myself on my hands, my face over the mouse's eye.
From the grass-blade voice: "Jesus Christ."
I up and spun. With my jungle-awareness, it took a half-minute's mental back-tracking to grasp that the pronunciation "Jesus Christ" had matched the movement of the mouse's mouth.
"Please. We're filming."
Behind a clump of grass, a party of mice with micro cameras and tech-sets, looking at me wearily. There was a quiet stirring in the area around my feet as The Mouse Who Had Been Dead got up and gave me a nasty look.
The director was not unkind about sending me away, but I felt extremely silly and - an overreaction, maybe - depressed. For five days I kept to my house. Twice in those five days came a knocking on the storm door, but having descended into a temporary benign madness, I could only call,
"We're filming!" and cachinnate.
I am recovered, but remnants of the madness cling; when nervous, I continue to say "we're filming".
This has lead to some unforeseen developments in my life.