The No Name Diary

It’s all about the understanding of time, how elastic it can really be. Then the vibe, finding the vibe, which is accesible on different levels to almost everyone. Despite those lives lived on each extreme, where it just isn’t possible.

***

Ice slipped out of our bedroom and padded downstairs once he thought we were asleep. He moved silently into the kitchen and poked his head under the fridge.

“Yo… Mouse…” Ice whispered, but got no answer. “You want to end up like your brother?” Ice waited, still silence, just the gentle hum of the fridge. “You gotta go bro, they’re onto you; I can show you a way out.”

Then there was a rustling and a noise which came from the back of the fridge where an aluminium grate protected the compressor. 

“Why should I trust you, cat?”, Ice moved around and saw the little brown mouse huddled in a dark corner behind the grating.

“You gonna die here bro,” Ice said, then he turned away and walked off no longer interested. 

• * * * 

About three o’clock in the morning Ice was out in the alleyway watching things from behind one of the neighbour’s plant pots, when a sound pricked up his ears and he froze dead still. Then out of the corner of his eye he saw the mouse hurrying along, hugging the brick wall on the opposite side of the alley, passing door number 5, number 3, Ice following with swift leaping steps and POUNCE! 

“Shhhhhh,” Ice hissed holding the terrified mouse by the head. “You don’t want to go that way”, Ice muttered calmly, looking to the little garden at the end of our street and keeping as still as rock again. The mouse’s heart thumped in its chest as it followed his gaze and saw the silhouettes of two cats appear, The Kids, as they’re known, coming into view and then leaping up one of the trees there. “Don’t move,” Ice said, picking up the mouse in his jaws and pacing off in the other direction towards the blocks in the middle of the estate.

It didn’t take long to get to the place. On the other side of the grey high-rises there was a large dirt patch where people parked their cars, dusty uneven ground with bits of crushed glass and tyre tracks. There, in a corner there was a hole in the earth. Ice let go of the mouse.