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Mouseman II
continued from last week
As he leapt over the zero G table, whacking his shin with a very dull cracking noise that probably would have been much less painful if he had simply been able to leap up and keep going up and over the table and not been subject to gravity, which dragged him down and right into the pointy corner of the table.
A few of the children might have laughed, as he skiddered across the floor and over to the radioactive mice cage, and the yelling boy.
"What's wrong? Are you okay?" He frantically pawed the cage. He quickly stopped pawing the cage so frantically when he realised the blood all over the cage and surrounding table over which he was just beginning to panic was coming from the cuts he was inflicting on himself by pawing the wire mesh of the cage.
The boy, being somewhat hysteric, shook in a general sort of way which indicated neither okay-ness nor un-okay-ness.
The scientist looked up, looking around for a lab assistant, who were never around when you needed them. He spotted a few of them in the soundproof room, sipping some sort of beverage out of mugs. They took far too much pleasure out of pretending to drink various lab specimens in a pretty childish gross-out style game. Fact was, the tap water they were making their coffee out of, even with the vigourous boiling they gave it in the coffee machine was statistically much, much worse for them than anything they might accidentally drink out of the lab fridge.
But this story wasn't about them. Nor was it about him, in fact. He was just stalling, trying to keep as much of the spotlight on himself, so much so he kept drawing attention to his disheveled hair. He might have even mistimed his jump to gain a little more word-time in deference to his injuries. He thought about that one... he hoped he hadn't stooped that low, but you never knew, what was done was done, and he tried not to dwell on it too much.
This story is about the boy. Who had stopped screaming, if only because no one was paying attention to him.
He was teasing the mice in the little blood-spattered cage by tickling their little teeth.
Which is when the scientist realised the focus was off himself, and yanked the kid away from the cages, and pulled him around the room, trying to assign him to an accompanying teacher... which wasn't as easy as it sounded, kids are damn tall these days.
But he eventually handed the kid over to an adult in charge, and he retired to the soundproof break room after dismissing the class trip, due to a clean-up crew being required for the mess by the radioactive mice's cages.
The kid went home, ate dinner, and went to sleep. All a whole lot more quietly than he had been earlier.
disclaimer:
Santa Cruuuuuuuz. Or Capitola, rather. Nice. Sunny.
Transplanted Clare girl in bikini.
Couldn't think much after that, to be honest with you. Which I'm sure you all can't blame me for.
Oh, and the water wasn't that cold.
Now this is what California is supposed to be all about, you know.
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Yer Weekly Horoscopes.