(Originally published at https://www.journeymouse.net/ on 31st July 2018)
I feel the quiver through the mattress, however slight, when Princess starts to dream.
Pretty soon she'll be chasing her prey across some imaginary landscape. Given she's such a delicate little thing she walks around the ghosts of puddles let alone actual mud and water, she probably dreams of running across endless fields of thick pile carpet. But gone are the days when her prey is confined to squeaky stuffed toys, their torsos nipped open with surgical precision, their stuffing removed to one side so that the oh, so chewable plastic squeaker is revealed. The only one to get their fill from these kills was the vacuum cleaner.
Her pursuit of flies and spiders - usually tormented and teased into their demise with paw-pokes, their rigid but frail corpses also fed the vacuum cleaner - had been an amusing phase but I don't suppose she ever chases them in her dreams. They are not good prey.
No. Prey must squeak and squeal and run away or fight.
I try not to shudder as the early dream-twitches become wuffles and running movements that are far more obvious. It's still hard to believe that such a small body can contain so much... energy? activity? violence?
These days, the vacuum cleaner feeds on wings. Large, clear wings that come in fours, veined and coloured like stained glass, that crinkle like cellophane, that feel disturbingly like dried skin beneath bare feet. It eats leaves that have not blown in on any wind. It devours mouse skins that have been decorated with little specks of glitter. And there are unspecified things I can barely see that hurt if I step on them, and ring and rattle into the vacuum cleaner like a pocket full of pennies.
I thought nothing of this new prey beyond wondering where and when and how she found it until this afternoon. If they're dumb enough to find their way into the place, they're too dumb to live. "If I leave them alone, they leave me alone," had always been a joke explanation for my own distaste in killing them. The one sided pact of non-aggression had made no difference to their numbers and, ultimately, neither would Princess.
But this afternoon, when she had not yet licked her muzzle clean.
At first I thought she had hurt herself, spotting red among the white hairs and whiskers. I hurried to her, voicing concern and pulling her lips this way and that to inspect despite her grumbling. There was a cut or two as I had feared, perhaps from one of those unseen rattling things. But there was also something I had hoped never to see.
Two little red hand prints, as if Tom Thumb or Thumbelina had been trying to pull themselves free from her jaws.
Two little red hand prints, each smaller than a fingerprint.
I wiped them away and thought nothing of it.
But tonight. Tonight, I can't sleep because those handprints were like mine if only so very much smaller. Tonight, I can't sleep because of those growls. Tonight, I can't sleep because I wonder what she dreams of chasing. Does my fearless Princess chase fairies across the carpet or does she dream of something similar but bigger?