The Small Boy and the Mouse by D H Maitreyabandhu
When he closed his eyes and asked the question,
he saw an egg, a boiled egg, lodged
above his heart. The shell had been broken off,
with a teaspoon he supposed, it was pure curd white
and still warm. Inside – he could see inside –
there was a garden with rows of potatoes,
sweet peas in a tangle, and a few tomatoes, red
and green ones, along with that funny sulphur smell
coming from split sacks. There was an enamel bathtub
in the garden, with chipped edges, a brown puddle
staining around itself, and a few wet leaves.
He could see down the plughole, so the sun must have shone,
and he heard his father digging potatoes,
knocking off the soil, and his mother fetching the washing in
because the sky promised a shower. There was a hole
or rather a pipe under the tub, where the water went,
and down at the bottom was a mouse – its ribs were poking out,
its damp fur clung together. The mouse was holding
a black-and-white photograph of a boy
who might have been three or four years old;
the boy was playing with boxes, or were they saucepans
from the kitchen? – he was leaning forward and slightly blurred.
And what was strange about the picture,
apart from being held by a mouse who sat on his haunches
and gripped it in his forepaws, was that the space
around the boy, the paleness around him, expanded,
got very bright and engulfed the mouse, the bathtub, the garden,
and the egg with its shell cracked off.
After that there was nothing, apart from the dark
inside the boy’s head and a kind of quiet
he’d never had before. He opened his eyes. All the furniture
looked strange, as if someone had rearranged it.
From here. More about the poet and the prize on that page. Go read.
