Sometimes life imitates art...

Sometimes it is life that imitates art. I wrote and illustrated a picture book about a mouse that loved to draw and who conveniently lived in an artist studio. Now I have three mice.

They apparently smuggled aboard by hiding in a Halloween storage box filled with past ghosts and bats and rats. A plastic pumpkin was filled with nicely torn and shredded mummy shroud with a small cavity padded with witch hair. I thought the absence of small bodies meant they had abandoned this bewitching abode but they were hiding…perhaps in the papier-mache’ skull or tucked away in a raven’s wing.

No matter how they came, they are here, thumping and scratching and quickly doing the pause…run…pause…run across my studio floor. I hear a scratch and briefly glimpse a tiny grey tail. I look up and that piece of popcorn, carefully placed to sneak-a-peek at my roommates, is gone.

Yesterday I opened a pencil drawer and one minuscule mousey stood on her hind legs and looked at me, “Well, now what are you going to do about it?” she seemed to ask and then spun and disappeared over the back of the drawer. I was so stunned to actually see her I had no idea of what to do.

I am now trying to find mouse sized Have-A-Heart traps so I can let them go back outside. My quandary is that I must keep them alive long enough to catch them alive. So I leave a bit of food and some water on the floor. Tomorrow it will be gone, hopefully by the end of the week my mouseys will be evicted, until then I am living my story.

I wonder if they can draw?