It's Late and I'm Waiting for My Clothes to Dry

There once was a mouse named Fred. Fred the Mouse. Fred lived a good, simple life. He darted between furniture in the dark of night and pinched little chunks of fallen food from the carpet and ate the occasional house ant for dessert. Fred's favorite food was chocolate licked off a candy bar wrapper. Sometimes he'd find an entire chunk of candy bar and he'd be like, "Sweet! This fucking rocks!" and he'd eat all the chocolate he could until he got sick.

Fred the Mouse also liked sleeping with humans. Fred had a cat complex and when his apartment's human would sleep he'd climb into bed with him and sit in the hollow of the man's right eye. He'd nestle there, as snug as a bug in a rug, and sleep until dawn's early light and then, before the man woke up, Fred would vamoose it back to his nest, which was a pile of feathers and candy bar wrappers behind the apartment man's bookshelf (in fact Fred slept right behind a collection of Guy de Maupassant stories).

This went on for years, years and years of simple comfort and bodily warmth, and Fred the Mouse grew gray with age and started telling random war stories to the ants and other assorted apartment bugs. And then one cold November morning the apartment man woke up with a dead mouse curled in the socket of his right eye and as he felt the small, still warm body, the man was relieved to know that not only was he not going blind in his right eye, but that he'd been so well loved all along and had not suspected a thing.