The Mice Inside Me — A Short Story with a Haunting Feel
A short allegorical & atmostpheric fiction piece about living with anxiety. Some might call this horror.
This short story was originally entered into a Vocal Media contest but did not win. Sharing here with my Medium.com audience who loves and follows my fiction. The story is an allegory, but was marked as a horror piece by Vocal Media. Can you find the underlying meaning?
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THE MICE INSIDE ME
by Christina M. Ward
I am a barn without an owl.
Last night, and every night since the weather turned cold and the horses were ushered in with their clip-clop hustle, the mice underfoot have taken refuge, tunneling through hay and scurrying along the beams. I scarce can stand the noise. They creep beneath my skin the moment I get still.
I pull the sheet higher and wrestle to keep it folded, just so, over the crimp and itch of the top blanket, a necessary weight to shield me against the cold, seeping in through the double sliding doors. I don’t have the energy to get up and shut the blinds. When I was a child, it was the gaping mouth of the closet door, open wide…
