A Bedtime Story for a Mouse. (standard:fairy tales, 812 words)
Author: Oscar A Rat	Added: Jul 26 2020	Views/Reads: 1355/940	Story vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
My house-mouse pal was depressed last night, and wanted me to tell him a bedtime story. His name is Jeff, and I whipped this one up to help him sleep.

Once, long, long, long, long ago, there was a little baby mouse named
... let's see now ... Jeff? He and his family lived in a comfy cave, 
way inside a mountain.  Outside, huge bears, dinosaurs, kitty cats, and 
other icky things lived. But little Jeff felt safe in his cave. 

His daddy was a fire-starter, going from human cave to human cave and
starting fires for the stupid creatures.  At night there would 
sometimes be a dumb human that would be too lazy to go outside to pee.  
He, and it was always a he, would do it in the fire in order to hear it 
sizzle.  Then, Jeff's father would be called to start the fire again so 
they could make hot cereal for breakfast. 

Jeff's mother was a buttonhole mouse.  She also worked for humans,
biting holes in hides for them to button up the garments to keep warm.  
But she did that at home, and had plenty of time for Jeff.  They'd play 
games together. 

One bad, bad day, while Jeff was playing hide-and-seek with his Mommy
and Daddy, he was hiding in a hole in the cave when he heard loud 
screaming.  Scared, Jeff hid for hours.  When he built up enough 
courage to come out, he found his family was dead.  Some mean 
saber-toothed aardvarks had come in and killed them, leaving bloody 
pieces all over.    There wasn't much left to bury. 

During the next few days, the little mouse became very hungry.  It was
all the little guy could do to keep the fire going and himself warm.  
He soon ran out of canned food and salami in the cave. 

One morning, he woke to find something heavy on his shoulder. 
Struggling out of his dinosaur skin pajamas, the ones with an Oscar 
Cave-Rat logo, Jeff saw a huge kitty, a lion with big tusks on each 
side of its mouth, sleeping next to him. One paw was almost crushing 
the tiny mouse. 

Jeff didn't know what to do, hide, run, or try to kill the kitty.  Well,
he wasn't so stupid as to try to kill the lion, he-he.  Instead, 
finding the big kitty cat had dragged in part of a dead zebra with a 
pepperoni pizza plant in its mouth, his tummy decided for him, and he 
sat down to eat first. 

While eating, he heard a deep growl. 

"Grrreeeeerrr, who are you?" 

"Me, me ... me? I'm Jeff, Jeff Mouse.  Who are you ...  ma'am?" 

"My mother calls me Cuddles, and I prefer to think of you as 'food.'" 

"Please don't eat me, Ms. Cuddles.  You need me, yes you do." 

"Why would I need a mouse, Food?" 

"I'm good at fires, and a real good cook." 

"I don't need any fires or cooking.  Raw zebra is plenty good like it
is.  By the way, Food, do you have any salt or pepper around?  And 
vinegar?  I love pickled zebra toenails.  My Mama used to fix them for 
me" 

"I can do that, if you will only do the cutting and heavy lifting.  I'm
better at pickling zebras than as one or two scrawny bites of food." 

Looking more closely at the little half-starved mouse, the kitty agreed.


So little Jeff Mouse became head-cook and fire-starter for the lion
family.  Especially the fire-starter, since a lion's paws couldn't pick 
up tiny wood-chips or grip small pieces of flint to make their own 
fires.  And they did find that a fire was nice on cold nights. 

Jeff and Cuddles became close friends, so close that Jeff slept in her
neck fur, warm and safe. 

One day, Jeff lay alone by the fire, watching and basting a roasting
calf.  He was reading a school book and not paying any attention to the 


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