L’auteure a écrit une nouvelle en anglais, de la perspective… d’une souris. On vous laisse lire l’incipit. Immergez-vous dans ce paysage en tempête. Imaginez la suite !
Texte en anglais
No one could have seen it, running through the field, through high and higher grass, covered in dirt, in water, in mud. Under the orangey sky, bitter orange, turning mahogany and soon as red as blood, as dark as ravens, though there weren’t any here, the little mouse was running. The sky was also filled with ugly clouds, Stygian—it would rain, perhaps it would storm too, but of that, the mouse wasn’t aware, it was just running.
In fact, it didn’t seem to go anywhere specific, it kept going, round and round, hidden by the vivid scarlet coral grass that filled the place, searching for food in the unproductive land. There wasn’t a place the plant hadn’t grown like weeds, long since forgotten, unkept, unwanted and wild. It had seemed to win the battle against the birch trees that surrounded the prairie, for they were all now crumbling like an old mule that had had to carry heavy loads until it died too. Along the abandoned road that split the land in two was a telephone pole with cut cables and darkened wood.
Suddenly, it came to a stop, looked around in near intelligence, but was really thinking — no, feeling: ‘need to eat, need to eat, need to eat’ with a twisted stomach and followed lanes of ants leading to the road. They came and went on the sidewalk made of dirt and dust, they were organized, lifting grains which were rotting away from a forgotten bag. They carried several times their sizes in seeds, following convoluted paths of pheromones back to their home.
The mouse didn’t have any home, it got destroyed by a useless and thus unnamed predator, and so it starved and had been struggling to survive for weeks. Anyone could have not just guessed, but seen that, whether it be because of its dirty fur and patches of bloody skin or, if you looked closely enough, from its protruding ribs, like a plastic material wrapped around rods. It was too small for its years of life and moved funnily, twisting with much difficulty to move around.
Had it had the mind to have such developed thoughts, it would think: “I need food, desperately. In an ideal world, I would have that thing that I found once, filled with a lot of resources, perhaps with some clear water too, but alas, those rotten grains will do just fine!” So fine, actually, that it filled its mouth with as much as it could, like a famished squirrel, and fled further onto the sidewalk before the ants decided to turn on it.