Guess the Rhyme...

I found a neat blog prompt this week that asks you to rewrite a nursery rhyme from one of the character’s points of view. I’m sure you can guess what mine’s about:

My name’s Jacques. Couple of years ago, me and my two brothers, Cousteau and Yves, decide we’re a little peckish, and head out of our little hole in the wall to see what we can scrounge up. And when I say hole in the wall, I wasn’t saying our apartment was crappy—well, it was, but my point is, we’re mice. So, we live in a hole in the wall. Really. Or we did then.

So we’re sniffing along the linoleum, when all of a sudden Cousteau’s like, “Whoa. That’s a really big…blur.” ‘Cause we’re nearsighted, so anything further than our whiskers is just a series of blurs in various sizes, shapes and colors. Hey, our health plan doesn’t cover vision.

But this was a new blur. And it was moving. So then all of a sudden Yves is like, “CAT!”, and we all take off running for our lives. Smack into the heels of the farmer’s wife. Remember that nearsighted thing I told you about? Yeah. Doesn’t come in handy when you’re moving at high speeds.

Stupid lady starts screaming her head off and hopping around on the foot we didn’t run into (yeah, ‘cause I’m so sure we hurt her—us weighing about two ounces apiece) and takes a whack at us with this huge carving knife.

And let’s just say it’s a good thing her aim is as bad as our vision, or we wouldn’t just be missing our tails.

After we made it back to our hole, we did what any self-respecting, nearsighted, tailless mice would do. We lawyered up. Sued the crap out of the farmer and his wife for introducing the cat, pain and suffering, and discrimination, since, with our vision problems, we fall under the Disabilities Act. Al Sharpton gave this really inspiring little speech about us on Larry King Live the one night that helped our case out a lot, I think.

Bottom line; we won the suit. Took the farm, plowed it under, and put in a bunch of luxury condominiums. Plus this singer-songwriter guy made up this cool little ditty about us. It really took off, too. Yeah, it’s “three BLIND mice,” instead of “three NEARSIGHTED mice,” but the guy said ‘nearsighted’ would have completely messed up his meter. Hey, with fifteen percent royalties, he could’ve wrote a song about three blind armadillos, for all I care.



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