« archive
See How They Run
It was three nights before Christmas when three blind mice assembled in a corner of the barn to make their wishes.
“I wish, I wish,” said the youngest mouse, whose name was Winky. He was indecisive. “I wish—”
“Tell us when you’ve made up your mind!” squeaked the eldest, Finky. He turned to the middle mouse. “What is your wish, Binky?”
“I wish for a great, yellow, greasy, smelly—”
“Pimple?” interrupted Finky, who was disgusting as well as impatient.
“No,” chirped Binky, a mouse of refined tastes. “I wish for a wheel of Parmesan cheese.”
“Coming right up,” snorted Finky. “I’ll swing by Parma and pick up a cheese for you.”
“I know you can’t do it. Maybe the angels can,” said Binky hopefully, and a little quietly, before shuffling away.
He was right. The angels were fully capable of transporting a giant wheel of cheese from an Italian storehouse to the English farm where the three blind mice lived. They could do it as quickly and easily as you or I can pick up a dish and carry it from the dining room to the kitchen. It wasn’t a question of capability. The question was whether the angels would bother to fetch a delicacy for such an insignificant creature as a mouse, a blind and an English one at that, on the busiest night of the year.
You see, there is no jolly white-bearded fellow in the Arctic who oversees a gang of industrious toy-making elves all year long until, in the early hours of December 25th, he makes guaranteed delivery on his supersonic reindeer-drawn flying sled. That is mercantilist piffle invented by an American toy dealer and propagated by a hack poet. Our three mice were not too blind to see the truth, known to most animals and Europeans, that Christmas presents are distributed by a multitude of celestially radiant, terrestrially invisible angels. In years when the Earth’s children have been especially well-behaved and therefore entitled to more gifts than usual, the angelic army is faced with such a logistical burden that it must call on demons for assistance. With all the business of requisitioning toys, assembling parcels, and keeping the demons in line, it is unlikely that an angel would take even the brief detour required to convey a fine cheese to a pathetic mouse.
It was in the knowledge of these facts that Finky felt entitled to mock his brothers’ wishes. The whole point of the meeting was for him to disillusion the other two blind mice.
“It seems Binky would like a wheel of cheese,” said Finky as he knowingly twirled a whisker around one paw. “Do you remember, Winky, what he wished for last year?”
Winky frowned thoughtfully. “It was something French, wasn’t it? A great, white, runny something or other.”
“A wheel of Camembert cheese,” twittered Finky. “And do you remember what he found in his nest on Christmas morning?”
“No, but I just remembered what I’m wishing for this year,” said Winky, brightening as his imagination colored in the outlines.
“Nothing!” cried Finky, meaning what Binky received last year. At exactly the same time, Winky cried, “A tail!”
A new tail was Winky’s small yet impossible wish. He had missed his tail ever since the farmer’s wife cut it off. You may have learned in school about this gruesome episode, in which the farmer’s wife confronted three blind mice in the larder and mutilated them with a carving knife. If you were taught that the mice had knocked over a jar of gooseberry jam, you should know that this is false. They went about their business very carefully and skillfully. The farmer’s wife had in fact been sitting in the larder when the mice crept in. She was sitting on the stool with her eyes closed and a carving knife in her lap, trying to recall what she needed from the larder—was it a pinch of nutmeg? a pound of salt?—for she was tired and absentminded in the midst of cooking a ham and nine different pastries.
When it struck her that she had come to the larder for honey to glaze the ham, and she opened her eyes to find mice winding their way among the preserves, the farmer’s wife flew into violent action. She swatted all three mice off the shelf, along with some preserves, and hacked away with her carving knife. It was she who broke the jar of gooseberry jam in her fury. The blind mice were lucky to escape with the loss of no more than their tails.
They had little use for tails anyway. An ordinary mouse needs a tail for balance in jumping and dashing, but these three moved so cautiously at all times, being blind, that their tails were merely naked pink decorations slithering behind as they went about their mousey errands. Yet Christmas is a time when we like to dream of petty luxuries. Winky had enjoyed coiling his tail around himself when he slept. He had also been fond of rubbing his chin with it, and batting dustballs from hole to hole in a game of blind golf.
“A tail!” cried Winky again, fearing that his wish had been nullified by Finky’s simultaneous cry of “Nothing!”
Now Finky cocked his ears in an attitude of deep reflection. “I comprehend,” he murmured. “This one desires a tremendous cheese, and that one prays for his tail. Where have I heard such wishes before?”
Winky also tried to think hard. He stroked his chin with his tail, or at least wanted to before he realized what was amiss. “I don’t know where,” he said.
“But I do,” said Finky. “I heard them right here, three days before last Christmas. Binky got no cheese, and I see you still have no tail. Ho, ho, ho.”
Winky crept away to the farthest corner of the barn and flattened his face against the ground, moistening it with tears trickling from sightless eyes. He wished he could wipe away his tears with a tail. He wished for a tail.
A demon heard Winky’s wish through the ether. The demon’s name was Blitzen, and he was loafing on the job. Before you try to correct me: Blitzen is not a reindeer name. It belongs to a demon. It was misappropriated, along with other demonic appellations, by a certain poet hired by an American toy merchant. As I say, Blitzen was taking an undeserved break from his gift-wrapping duties. He was idly scanning the ether for cries of agony, the way a human would turn the radio dial in search of music, when he detected mental distress emanating from an English barn. Though Winky had a mild spirit, he suffered sharply. The demon paid close attention.
“His tail carved off by the farmer’s wife,” sighed Blitzen. “How wonderfully wretched.” Like all demons, he was an aficionado of pain. Then he sensed another mournful thought in the same vicinity. It was the suffering of Finky, who had made himself miserable shortly after Winky wandered off.
“Wants his bloody tail,” Finky had muttered to himself. “May as well wish for vision.” This reminded him of the blindness that he tried constantly, and usually with success, to forget. Now he rocked back and forth and whimpered softly, much to Blitzen’s pleasure.
“Small, feeble, and blind.” chortled the demon. “Ho, ho, ho.”
“Cease your deviltry,” came a peremptory voice over Blitzen’s head. It was the archangel Raphael, tapping his clipboard with a platinum pencil. “I command you, Blitzen, to resume gift-wrapping this instant. You fell two million below quota this morning, and by heaven, I’ll see you make it up.”
Blitzen showed his enmity by letting a flaming maggot crawl out of one nostril, but then he sucked it up and bent to his task. Before devoting his full demonic concentration to wrapping a thousand presents at once, he savored one more portion of misery issuing from the barn.
“Just a bit of cheese,” came Binky’s lament. “Why won’t the angels bring me a paper-thin slice of Parmesan cheese?”
Three nights later, when Blitzen was surging through the murky morning sky over Bologna with an armload of lavish gifts, trying to cheer himself with thoughts of earthly suffering, it was Binky’s yearning for cheese that he recalled most clearly. He scowled.
“Why am I bringing joy to a bunch of virtuous Bolognese brats?” he thought. “I would do better to fulfill occasions for sin. I could indulge, say, the gluttony of a mouse.”
He flung his arms wide and let the dollhouses and laptop computers and bicycles plummet to pavement, onto rooftops, into canals. This is what happens at Christmas when there are so many wishes to grant that the heavenly host presses demons into service. Inevitably, some of the subcontractors find a reason to skive off, and gifts go missing.
A moment later, Blitzen was in Parma. It was half a moment’s work to filch a heavy wheel of ripe cheese. A few moments more, and he was hovering over three blind mice nestled in a bundle of hay in an English barn.
Winky awoke first. “There’s something foul in the air,” he squeaked.
Now Finky opened his eyes. “Damn it, I can’t see.”
And Binky came to life, his whiskers quivering in rapture. “What a stinking good cheese!”
Blitzen flung the wheel of Parmesan to the ground. He watched Binky leap on it and begin tearing at the rind with all four paws. Here was a terrific stomachache in the works, he thought to himself with satisfaction. He turned his attention to the other blind mice.
“Hello, Finky,” he said. “I know what you wish for. Presto, you have it.”
Visual sensations crowded Finky’s brain. He was flooded with the sight of everything nearby that he could smell or hear: Binky clawing at the cheese, Winky squeaking in alarm, a smoky red figure suspended in midair. Finky turned his newfound gaze toward the rafters. The impression of distance awed him. He chirped with delight as a handful of snowflakes slipped through a crack in the roof and fell lightly through the air. Now another snowflake drifted through a gap in the wall, and dozens more came in by the door. What a blind mouse could only perceive as airborne ice shavings were revealed to Finky’s vision as the whimsical dance of delicate crystals.
An ill consequence would follow, the demon knew. And the smallest mouse? Should Winky’s innocuous wish be granted?
“What the hell,” grunted Blitzen. “Have a tail. Maybe you’ll choke on it.”
In place of the old stub, a proper new tail sprang from Winky’s posterior. He sang a high-pitched aria of thanks before churning up a dustball and knocking it across the barn with his tail. He scampered after the ball. Binky was scampering, too, round and round about his cheese. And Finky’s legs carried him swiftly outside to revel in the ballet of snow.
“See how they run,” chanted Blitzen. “Three blind mice, see how they run.”
He followed Finky out to the barnyard, where the once-blind mouse ran in ever wider circuits, his eyes darting from flake to fluttering flake. His widest circuit brushed the threshold of the doghouse, which he would surely have avoided in a less frenzied mood. A shaggy black paw intercepted Finky and shoveled him between a pair of slavering jaws, which immediately clamped shut. The dog swallowed, yawned, and went back to sleep with a canine thanksgiving for the unexpected morning snack. His work accomplished, Blitzen merged with the snowstorm and shot away to a demonic realm.
Later that day, Binky took ill from the surfeit of dense cheese. After vomiting forty times, he resolved nevermore to lust after edibles. The resolution did not last long in the presence of Parmesan. Binky suffered through many more cycles of temptation, indulgence, catharsis, and repentance before the entire wheel was gone.
Winky never did choke on his tail. He played a great deal of blind golf with it, though for some time the fun was tempered with fear of the calamity that would surely ensue from the devilish gift. He gradually lost his anxiety as it became clear that nothing untoward was happening. Perhaps, he reasoned, it was because he had suffered enough by witnessing poor Binky’s gastric upheavals, and of course by losing his learned brother Finky. By and large, Winky was content. He had a new tail. Binky eventually came to rights. And if Finky was no more, the two surviving mice could always wish for his miraculous return. As to whether this wish came true, well, that’s a story for another season.