Joey and the mice

Joey made a trade with a friend, and got a pair of mice and a little cage for them. He fed them some special grainy food he had bought with his allowance at the pet store. One mouse was male, and the other female. Joey's friend had told him they weren't siblings.

After a while the female gave birth, and Joey was happy. There were 8 little baby mice. Over the next few weeks they grew up and reached full size. By this time Joey had figured out how to tell the males from females, and he separated them into separate cages. The thought of mice incest made him sick, so he was very careful not to let it happen.

Now, the idea of mice incest made Joey sick, but at the same time it was strangely...compelling. Frequently he would wonder what would be the product. What type of weird, mutated offspring would be the result? What if you kept doing it, generation after generation? What would happen? Joey would often wonder about these things, but he never actually allowed it to happen.

Instead, Joey was sort of frantic keeping the males and females separated, and yet since he wanted to have more and more mice under his control, he had to have more mating going on. So he would continue buying new male mice from his friend, which he would then mate with the females. As long as he kept the males separated, and only allowed new male mice from his friend's collection to mate with his females, he could be sure there wasn't any incest going on.

Over time he had many dozens of mice, and he was spending a larger and larger portion of his allowance on new cages and food for them. Cleaning up after them was getting to be tiresome also, and he had run out of experiments to perform. The experiments had all been trying to see what the mice could learn, if they could learn to travel down a tube and come out a certain hole, or if they could learn to look for food in a certain place. After a while he didn't want to know anything more about mice, and so he decided to set them free.

He had built a special frame on his floor that served as a pen, keeping the mice inside. It was a square made from 1 inch by 6 inch pieces of wood, and the square was 6 feet on a side. He had very carefully sanded the wood so the mice couldn't get a grip and climb over it. Once inside, the mice were unable to get away.

He then decided how he was going to set the mice free. It would require some special training, and he would have to make a gadget to assist. First, he took an old boot, and cut the sole away. Then inside the boot he glued some strips of wood sideways, and put little containers on the strips that would hold the mouse food. The strips were about 1 and 1/2 inches up from the bottom of the leather sides of the boot. Where a person's leg would go into the boot he put a cardboard tube that had once held some large posters. It was about 3 inches in diameter and 4 feet long. He glued the tube into the boot, and laced the boot up. He had cut some holes into the tongue of the boot so he could put in a tube to fill the food containers. Finally he took a pair of old jeans, cut off one of the legs, and fixed it so the leg came down around the boot. From the side it looked like a person's leg, wearing a boot.

Joey put several of his mice into the pen, put some food in the containers, and then held the boot down so the mice could climb up from underneath and get at the food. He began only feeding them this way, and after a short time the mice became accustomed to eating. They could climb up onto one of the slats inside the boot, and from there nibble at the grains in one of the containers.

Joey began feeding them more and more infrequently, so they were in general more hungry than they were accustomed to. And he would have larger groups of mice in the pen at the same time. And he would move the boot around in walking motions, slowly at first, then faster as the mice got used to it. They would race and climb over each other to get to where the boot would be coming down, so they could be underneath to climb up inside the boot and get the food. Joey was impressed at how good they got at it. Eventually all the mice were trained to run underneath the boot when it was coming down, even when they weren't hungry. But they'd move especially fast when they were hungry.

Joey fasted the mice for a day, and for a mouse this is a long time to go without food, so they were pretty frantic. Then he loaded them all up into grocery bag, males and females alike, put it into the basket on his bicycle, and rode over to the train station. Just before rush hour, when a train would be coming and dumping off a huge load of passengers, Joey arrived at the station. As the train was slowing to a stop, and the doors were opening, Joey put the bag on its side on the ground, and then upended it, pouring the mice out. Then he ran out as quickly as possible, got on his bike, and rode home. He had glanced back once, and had seen his mice all running frantically towards the group of people disembarking at the station.

Joey never found out what had happened to the mice, but he suspected they didn't suffer long. He figured the people getting off the train would be worse off.