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Wednesday, March 9, 2016
Flash Fiction: Martin Mundt
The Mouse
by Martin Mundt
(previously published in Nightspots, Feb 03)
My gunshots died away, firecracker echoes drifting down the alley behind the theme park, behind the castles and roller-coasters, behind the crowds and the minimum-wage smiles, back where the high-rev dreams downshifted into ductwork and delivery trucks. I listened to the darkness and heard nothing.
I’d seen the Mouse – seven feet tall and wearing clothes. I’d heard it run -- not on scurrying mouse-feet -- but clomping and clacking, like monstrous clown-shoes tipped with claws. I’d spun around and seen it break from cover behind a Dumpster, galumphing into the shadows, and I fired, my pistol strobing the alley with muzzle-flashes, lightning visions of fleeing red pants, bulbous white gloves and big yellow clown-shoes. I’d heard a gasp, maybe two: the last, fetid mouse-breaths slammed from its lungs by my slugs.
I hadn’t smiled.
My vacation had gone bad, real bad.
I slipped into the alley, creeping beneath the slanted shadows of fire escapes, as black and white as a cartoon prison. My eyes dilated with the darkness, the drug of near-success hitting my bloodstream. Maybe, I thought, maybe this time I’d finally done it.
Then I saw it, just like I’d always hoped. A seven-foot mouse, lying on its side, facing away from me, one huge round ear sticking up like the lid of a trash can, tail limp as an unplugged cord, head flopped into a spreading rainbow-puddle of oil and blood.
I’d seen it before, of course, plenty of times. My earliest memories were of staring at the television, but when it was turned off. I waited for the Mouse to sneak out the holes in the back of the set, but the rodent was always too devious for me. The Mouse didn’t sneak into the living room or my bedroom: the Mouse snuck into my dreams. Just a smile at first. The same smile I’d seen all over the theme park, the rigid smile of abject broken obedience, the brainwashed smile of forced labor, the twisted smile of demented rodent insanity. But first, all those years ago, that smile had infected my brain.
The fangs entered my dreams later. The shadows in my dreams were mouse-shaped, skittering under my dream-bed. Fur like steel-wool brushed my face as I lay half-sunken into sleep, and then the claws ripped at my eyes, and the fangs sank into my neck, and I woke screaming, but no one else ever saw the Mouse. It was too quick to let itself be seen, squatting instead behind my eyeballs, spreading through my brain like a giggling animated tumor. It took me a long time to realize that I was the only truly sane person in the entire world, because I -- and I alone -- had seen the true naked evil of the Mouse.
I smiled in the alley, smiled like I’d always dreamed I would one day. I rolled the Mouse onto its back, its other ear popping out with an audible ’sprong’. My slugs had shredded its face, now an unrecognizable mush that only forty-five caliber dum-dums can produce. The ragged edges of the wound smoked, and I smelled charred wool.
So -- it wasn’t the Mouse after all, but a man dressed in a Mouse suit. They roamed everywhere, decoys, sacrificial doubles, re-educated drones taking the bullets meant for the real Mouse. I’d gotten three already, and now, here, a fourth.
My smile died.
The Mouse still capered out there somewhere in the park, still gibbered behind my eyes. It had doubles and fear on its side, but I had time. I snapped another magazine into my pistol.
I had plenty of bullets.
And my vacation had just begun.
About the Author:
Martin Mundt has published one novel, Reanimated Americans, and three collections of short stories, including his latest, Synchronized Sleepwalking, which debuts this week, as well as The Crawling Abattoir and The Dark Underbelly of Hymns, all of which are available from Dark Arts Books and Amazon. His novella, The Cranston Gibberer, was published by Bad Moon Books. Seven of his short stories have received Honorable Mentions in The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror anthologies. He lives in Skokie, Illinois, and can be found in the glittering caves of cyberspace at www.martinmundt.com and on Facebook and Twitter.
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