mouse. 9f. 8th games.

Many might say that we're too young to remember the war. That to us it was a bad dream. That we have no right to say it changed us fundamentally, that trauma rattled in our bones and turned us into something else. And I get why, I guess. I can empathise with the reality they went through, the brutality of understanding what was happening around them. How most kids can't even comprehend a once free life turned upside down, shackled in chains of their own doing. I get why they think we don't remember. Not like they do. 

But I remember the way our house shook, the day my parents left home and never came back. I remember standing at the end of our driveway the next morning, picking up the rusted mailbox tipped over from shrapnel - a long-since faded surname painted in blue on its side. I remember waiting, and waiting, and waiting. I remember the day I realised they weren't coming back and turned around, went inside, shut the door.

I remember the day the door blew open, trembling in the dumbwaiter with my hand clamped over my mouth, waiting for the looters to find me or leave. I remember crouching there for hours and hours after until my legs cramped and my feet went numb and my teeth chattered so hard I broke one in two.

I remember how it clanked into the porcelain sink, blood dribbling down my lips. I remember looking at my reflection and spitting at her, saliva and scarlet. I remember wiping it away, trying to cry and my throat not making a sound.

I remember the day the guns stopped shooting and the tanks rolled through the streets. I remember the day I thought I was saved. The aftermath that followed.

I remember.

I remember.

I remember.




The boys at the factories took me in as one of their own, got me a job, spoke for me when I couldn't. I didn't say a peep so they called me Mouse, covered for me when the adults asked if I still had parents at that house I trailed home to every night, aching shoulders and calloused hands from working long hours. Good sorts, back then I just thought them kind but now I realise it's so rare to find those types around these parts these days. 

Some of the older ones wanted to befriend me for the wrong reasons but the lad up the street whose sister I used to play with told them not to touch me. His sister was long gone, piece of metal blown off a neighbours roof and straight through her stomach. A casualty, unlucky - but not the unluckiest. I think he kept me safe because I reminded him of her, or some part of her at least. A memory, perhaps. I don't know - I guess I won't get to ask him now. Not that I would. 

I don't know why I stopped speaking. It all just became too much. Surviving was easier if I just kept quiet - as a mouse. As a ghost. I could float through my life dazed, tedious and monotonous work in the factory a rhythm I could easily unfollow. I kept my life without complication. Just lucky to be here, to keep on being here. Not living, exactly. Just existing.  

"Who's that one?" a gruff Keeper asked, pointing a gloved finger straight at me. "She's unaccounted for."

"That's Mouse," the boys would say. Just Mouse.

"Mouse who?"

Shrug, little girl's big brother stepped in - "McCann. She's my sister, sir. Fifteen next month."

The Keeper's turn to shrug - there was a girl who had lived in that house, once. Didn't she die? Or was it the other one, two blocks down with no parents? Whatever, it suited them enough. Scratched down Mouse McCann, moved on.  So that's how I became a ghost with a dead girl's last name and a beating heart. Mouse McCann, for all the world to see. Sure it won't be so bad when the beating stops. I can be a dead girl. 

After all, I've been dead for years.