A Mouse’s Periwinkle Dreams Deferred
The following story was written during Overlake’s Upper School Parliament as part of a writing activity. Participants were challenged to come up with a word bank, then to use at least one of those words in each of the sentences of the story they wrote together. The words were: apathy, befuddle, cake, cloak, cloud, dew, glitter, haze, hill, joy, lament, mouse, origami, paint, palomino, periwinkle, purple, saxifrage, statue, terra firma, violet, and wildflowers.
On a dark and stormy night, in a very small mouse-hole, was a mouse which would have liked to spend the whole evening wrapped up in a good book. The mouse-hole the mouse lived in was so cold, she was constantly wearing a purple cloak, gifted to her by a good friend. So she decided to walk down to the river and see if she could find periwinkles to eat. In her quest for periwinkles for food, she spotted a lone hazy cloud floating along the riverbank and abandoned her hunger-driven mission; she was now on a quest to catch it. Alas, she was just a mouse and the cloud was too high for her to catch; so lamenting her lost treasure, she returned to looking for wildflowers.
She spent her day riding a palomino through fields of saxifrages, squeaking with joy. One day, she was overcome with immense joy as she found that the cloud had come down as fog to play with her. She followed it between the hills, getting lost in the haze, and pulled on her cloak to stay warm. Suddenly, the fog stopped and brought out violet paper. It challenged her to an origami contest. The sudden challenge befuddled her, but the fog was deadly serious. So the mouse got started, placing the paper on top of dew-covered grass as she made precise folds. As the contest progressed, the mouse felt her apathy fading away, overcome with a desire to win.
The terra firma quaked as they furiously folded. The hills shook, causing a painted statue to fall to the ground. The statue, I think it’s safe to say, was greatly displeased. The mouse did not want to displease such a great entity so she offered to provide him cake to make amends. Unfortunately, the statue did not accept this offering and instead demanded the origami they were folding. The cloud, with its injured pride, took great offense to this and not only refused to hand over its preciously forged origami but challenged the ancient entity itself to a different contest: a rap battle. The mouse began to become concerned with the events taking place. But the cloud and statue remained undeterred, and the battle commenced without pomp or glitter. The mouse was in shock; she knew this would be too powerful, and she could not stay.
So she ran all the way home to her mouse-hole, sitting down to read her book as she had initially planned.
Written by: Stephen Ringo, Melissa Lin, Ilinca Hagiu, Tessa Dunagan, Eva Lindberg, Angela Lane, Natalie Kong, and Annika Rasmussen
