Smorgasbord

It is dark. Pitch black. A small brown-haired creature scurries over a tiled ceiling grid. Defecating and urinating in each square with every few steps. Nose twitching with ancient instinct. Its beaded black eyes reflect nothing in the darkness up here. A nearby generator of some sort hums and is the only sensory input the little mouse can register, though it’s more of a vibration to him. His whiskers dangle, guiding the blind mouse through a vast maze of institutional mid-century drop ceiling, boiler pipes, and cinder block to his holy grail. It is being summoned by the radiance of a curdled stench it can’t resist. Something of sustenance. It finally bumps into the source of the odor. A laminated carton hidden 3 weeks ago by a trouble-making student too introverted to act out and make a scene in class, instead opting for covert rebellion in the form of deferred sensory warfare. A ticking time-bomb of an olfactory assault. Climbing up the side of the carton the mouse sloshes the pungent, thickening contents inside. It is no longer entirely a liquid, but has not yet become a solid. It’s in the amorphous in-between stage of being something else. Following the stench of neglect to a salvation of satiety the mouse sniffs an opening, and climbs up the side of the box and sticks its head inside the gaping fish-like mouth and begins licking and drinking whatever curdled contents in the warm climatically-segregated drop ceiling his tiny mouth and tongue can reach. His head now deep inside, his olfactory senses of both nose and mouth fully engulfed by rotted dairy. All four of his legs since the novel discovery have made their way onto the carton in such bleak desperation for another mammal to endure as he crams the conical nose deeper and deeper, trembling with the promise of long-awaited nourishment, into the coagulated bovine fluid, consuming a putrid final smorgasbord. As the mouse consumes the fetid liquid, the weight distribution of the carton begins to shift in favor of the top heavy mouse, and threatens to spill half a pint of necrotic dairy in a space unseen. Whether it was being tilted unexpectedly in total darkness throwing off his equilibrium that startled him, or just pure exhaustive gluttony, the mouse without any concept of the peril he’s about to find himself in relinquishes his grip and plummets headfirst into the clotted substance. His tiny panicked squeaks—further muffled by sound dampening ceiling panels and a humming generator—allow the pasteurized substance that was only just recently squeezed out of a distant factory-farm heifer to enter his tiny lungs. Without any understanding of how his primordial gluttony animals need to survive is what led to this demise, the agonized squeaks slow until they finally halt. The little guys lungs fill and soon, but not soon enough, he reaches his own personal oblivion. His tiny, brown, hairy, corporeal shell currently sitting curled, entombed in the hardening liquid.