Marcel moved across the cold floor, his claws sliding and making tiny screeching sounds that made him jump. Occasionally he even fled the sound of his own passing, so that his trajectory across the room was a ragged zigzig, stopping at an antique baler to cower or against a cotton gin display to catch breath.

He didn’t know where to go. Out of this room, at very least — his father would surely find him and chivy him out, should he settle so close. He scuttled to the next doorway and peered into the gloom. Nothing but pictures; the nearest blazed with gaudy, overblown flowers that drooped over a staring, bloody rabbit. Marcel sniffed nervously, and started out into the room. He was halfway across, with a doorway ahead and one on his right, when he made the mistake of glancing up at the wall again.

There, curled into a ball but with eyes lazily trained, was a cat. A horrible, silky cat, with eyes as yellow as harvest moons and ivory teeth glinting suggestively from its dark mouth. Marcel’s heart took a running start, circled his head, took brief refuge in his ears, and then took off again. Finding nowhere safe anywhere in his quivering body, it leapt off to the right, carrying the frantic mouse with it.

He bounded through the doorway, past a motley collection of harps and mandolins, through another doorway, past a suit of armor…he received only impressions, flashes of each room through which he dashed, and the impressions he received did little to calm his racing heart and paws. Ahead, darkness loomed, and before he could stop, he had bowled into a low platform, perhaps four inches off the marble, covered with plushy carpet. He rolled off to the side and sat up, shaking the stars away.

He was in a room whose walls were dark with highboys and sideboards, china cabinets, wardrobes and grandfather clocks. Musty wood scent was on the air. The platform which had stopped his career rose at the center of the room, and from it rose a bed.

Its posts were dark, ruddy things, encrusted with carved oak leaves and acorns, and between them dark thick folds of burgundy velvet hung. Entranced, Marcel pulled himself up onto the platform and tiptoed up to the bed, smelling the reassuring woodiness and dust. This was a good home for a mouse, he decided, and began to slowly scale the bedpost, curling his little claws over the ornate protuberances and slithering up the edge of leaves. Following the curve of a branch, he passed behind the sheltering curtain and onto the rolling expanses of faded velvet blanket. He toiled across the bed, which gave so much under his tiny feet that he reeled and fell like Maxime on Bastille Day.

He put down his food-tin and curled into the space between the two luxurious pillows, smelling the smell of old down that still clung in the most remote parts of the dovecot. How relaxed he felt! How opulent his new home had proved! He drowsily closed his eyes, whispering, “Won’t mother be surprised when she finds out how aristocratic I am?”

No sooner had the little pink lid closed over the dark drop of an eye than it flicked open again. Aristocratic? He looked around. Perhaps his father had declared him a failure, a mouse without principles, but did he really mean to jump so fully into apostasy? He shivered, and suddenly the plush velvet did not seem so warm. Aristocratic. This did seem like an aristocrat’s bed. And of course an aristocrat’s bed would be in a museum, because as his father had taught them at great length, every aristocrat had been killed during the Revolution. Marcel was not sure why they were still a menace if this was the case, but the language had been quite unequivocal.

So…he was sleeping in an aristocrat’s bed…in a dead person’s bed! He jumped away from the pillows, quivering, and into a beam of moonlight that fell through a moth-hole in the canopy, like a pale cold finger touching his terrified back. The curtains gusted in a breath from somewhere, and their dark, shifting pile, moving like a man might in his sleep, seemed no longer seemed a comfort that kept the world at bay, but a wall that kept poor Marcel within!

The little mouse closed his eyes, then opened them, then opened one and closed one. No use! His new home had been transformed by a moment’s thought. The burgundy was the color of blood, the velvet was the wages of oppression, and even the carving on the dark wood seemed part of a sepulchral inscription.

With a petrified squeak, Marcel threw his food-tin ahead of him and dove at the nearest curtain. It embraced him, choked him, checked him, wound itself around his struggling form, and finally let him fall, scrabbling and fighting and scared out of his wits, back on the low platform in the furniture room, staring out at the rooms that must, somewhere, contain a home.

Was out sick this morning and am therefore swamped at work. When I fight my way out of the deep end, more mousiness will ensue.

Schubert’s Symphony No. 8 plays with a crackling, phonograph sound as the screen shows the word Intermission, flanked by mice and underlined with a tri-couleur bunting. An apologetic figure shuffles out and squints into the light of the projector.

Sorry, pips and pods. Too busy-busy for museum mice today. Marcel’s touching story of cowardice and counter-revolution shall conclude, as they say in France, demain. In the meantime, please feel free to move about the theatre, and do sample Françoise’s excellent caramel corn at the concessions booth.

Marcel landed with a thump and sprang sideways with a squeak, for he had arrived directly upon a woodcut of a revolutionary grimacing in murderous hatred. He scrabbled a bit on the smooth placard, and finally managed to hold on just at the very edge. The pale floor below seemed very far, and Marcel’s nose twitched in consternation. His trepidation was short-lived, however, as with a cry of “Vive la France!” his little brother Marius came shooting out of the sky and sledded down the placard on his back, kicking Marcel over the edge. They both rolled to a stop on the cold marble, and Marius leapt up with a toothy smile and an air of derring-do.

“Farewell, MOUSE!” cried Marius, and scampered off towards the main atrium. With less fanfare, the other Souris children landed around Marcel (in the case of Micheline, nearly atop him) and made their way towards London and the world. They mostly avoided his gaze, save Modeste, who gave him a silent clap on the back before trailing away, lost in thought.

Marcel scampered back towards the base of the pedestal and hunkered against it. The sounds of the museum were close and immediate, without the dovecot walls. The air moving as the night cooled, the tick-tick-tick of humidity meters, the display cases in the gift shop creaking with temperature change. He heard the soft patter of insects about their business. He heard the night guard drop his newspaper, and the echoes rushing back and forth like a chorus of paper-winged angels falling to earth. He heard a soft thud behind him.

He whirled, ready to scarper, even into the great unknown, but it was only Martine. She held a tiny breath-mint box and motioned him to quiet. “I cannot budge him, lovie. It’s out of the dovecot for you, and for good.” Marcel sniffed back a sob. “Oh, there, there, it’s not the end of the world.”

“No…no it isn’t the end of the world, it’s the beginning of it! The World, the horrible awful world, full of cats and aristos and tour buses and terrifying dogs!”

“Not necessarily. There’s all this museum to pass before you get to the world, and I’m sure in all this preserve of the old, musty and forgotten there must be another place where a skittish little fuzzy-face can hide himself.” Marcel looked at his mother with love shining in his big dark eyes, and she laughed and thrust the mint box at him. “Away with you then! There’s some food for your journey, and p’raps I’ll find you again someday. Mother loves you, Marcel, remember that.” And she was gone, clawing up the pedestal.

Marcel clutched the tin, from which wafted the delectable smell of day-old crisp-crumbs from the cafe and fallen bits of sandwich cheese. It also smelled like home, and mother. He started out across the pale shadow of a paned skylight, ready to find a new home away from the World.

Marcel lived in the British Museum, with his father, Maxime Souris; his mother, Martine Souris; and his latest batch of siblings: Marius, Madeleine, Melisande, Modeste, and Micheline. They inhabited a fine old dovecot, which had been ripped from its moorings by a ravening crowd of revolutionaries and was only saved from burning by the appearance of someone who needed to be hung. It sat in the field, and then in a blacksmith’s back shed, until at last it became History and bobbed from museum to museum. It was rather ungainly, and its historical place was so minor that each museum soon tired of it and its musty, rural smell; but the British Museum had a large empty spot in a room of pastoral artefacts, and there it settled.

According to Maxime Souris, his family had made the entire trek with this dovecot; his arrière arrière grandpère had crawled into the fallen dovecot, rebelliously staking his claim to the former palace of the lordly doves, and there he had raised a family of revolutionary fieldmice, which spread across France and Britain as the vast birdhouse made its rounds.

“Six squads of Souris have I loosed upon Britain!” cried Maxime, “and my father before me, fifteen! Zese foul conservative bière-drinkers will be sorry zey opposed zee revolution!”

Martine, who was born Mary Chestnut and was quite an ordinary British churchmouse until she ascended to the storied house of Souris, just smiled indulgently and picked up some strong pieces of straw with which to patch the side of the baby nest. Marius had been a rather athletic mouseling.

Marcel, on the other hand, was not particularly vigorous. He liked to help his mother around the dovecot, and found his father’s lectures on insurrection and political agitation rather distressingly sanguine. When Maxime led raiding parties to the museum café, Marcel was always discovered to have an upset stomach, or to have vertigo at the idea of dropping from the dove-holes to the ‘Symbol of the Rapacious Aristocracy’ placard below. When his littermates saluted their parents and dropped silently into the outside world, Marcel burrowed under the straw at the back of the dovecot and hid. When the litter after him swore their allegiance to the cause of revolution and disappeared into the marble fastness, he climbed up into the cupola of the ornate birdhouse and waited for them to be gone. When Micheline, Melisande, Madeleine, Modeste, and Marius assembled in ranks to carry the word of Souris to the waiting rodentia of London, Maxime put his foot down.

“Marcel, I do not believe you are sick. I do not believe you are afraid of hauteur, of heights. I am of zee opinion zat you are afraid tout simplement!”

The girls looked grave, Martine looked away, Modeste studied a tract written on a cookie fortune, and Marius made a face at his older brother over Maxime’s shoulder.

“Weeeeell?” said Maxime, “Will you not defend your honneur, my boy? Zee reputation of your glorious famille?”

“No, sir,” shuffled Marcel. “You are quite right. I’m afraid to live outside the dovecot. It is so warm and comfortable here, and so cold and dark out there!”

Maxime’s eyes bulged, each seeming larger than his skinny claws. “OUT! You will be OUT of my house, you ingrate! Running dog royaliste! Counterrevolutionary! Mirabeau! You shame the name of Souris! Zee spark français is not in you! You are not a Souris! You are just a Mouse!”

And with that, he marched Marcel to the nearest dove-hole, grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and the base of the tail, and pitched him out into the echoing blackness of the British Museum, for the first time out of the sweet smell of straw, air rushing cold and blue around him, alone and frightened and small.

Here are the things which have not worked properly this morning:

1. Super Whizbang Color Printer-Copier; decides my print job requires 10.51×7.24 paper, despite my having specified letter.
2. SWBCPC; decides to split one print job of 13 copies of a small document into 13 print jobs, each taking at least five minutes and requiring hand-removal from the sorter in order to not clog up the printer; and then printing each 13 about 67 times.
3. Windows Printer control panel; apparently I have sent no documents to SWBCPC, and no one else has either (clearly belied by the disgruntled employees stalking the copy room).
4. SWBCPC’s dedicated print-queue box; was probably involved in all of this monkey business, and enjoyed very much making me sit on the floor waiting to cancel the offending jobs and then leap up to clear the sorter.
5. Apologies, jokes, suggestions of using second-floor SWCPC; effect on disgruntled employees uncertain.
6. Second floor SWBCPC; thus sending streams of disgruntled second floor employees up here to try to get print jobs out of OUR SWBCPC.
7. My webmail; thus forcing me to use Gmail.
8. Power cycling the SWBCPC’s DPQB; it shouldn’t remember! BUT IT DOES! (Like Ripley 8 in Alien Resurrection, except instead of creepy superhuman antics, it prints billions of copies of my print job in varying sizes and staple-states. Happy Earth Day.)
9. One gal’s e-mail; thus freeing her to make black and white copies and giving me someone to chat with while I haunt the copy room destroying the evidence that the SWBCPC’s nervous breakdown is Somehow My Fault.
10. wonko’s spam filter; bounced one of my Gmail messages.
11. The online conference room booking system.
12. The separate conference room booking system the conference room booking hotline uses.
13. Last but not least, the SWBCPC AGAIN; despite the 2nd floor SWBCPC having shaped up, the 3rd floor SWBCPC and DPQB are sitting serenely and sweetly showing themselves ready to print, and yet not printing…except every half an hour or so when they spit out another copy of a randomly selected two pages of my 9:30 am print job.

I think I miss my typewriter.

This is one of my favorite words for no better reason than the fact that I learned its provenance in my ‘History of the English Language’ class in college and thought they were, well, neat.

It comes from the Old English verb cwellan, ‘to kill’, and is the textbook example of words’ meanings being either strengthened or softened over time. Also, I think the word has a fitting sound, with the breathy open ‘kweh’ sound being capped down by the ‘l’. You may notice that’s a common theme in my favorite words!

With difficulty, Hortense quelled her rage and turned white-lipped away from her sarcastic professor.

When I was little, there was only one person I was ever told I looked like. It was so inevitable that when people said, “Wow! You really look like that girl, you know…” I would fill in for them, “Winnie Cooper. From The Wonder Years.” in my best Eeyore tones.

In vain did I protest to my friends, “But she doesn’t have a chin! And she’s so WISHY-WASHY! Am I wishy-washy?” They assured me I had both chin and personality in spades, and I felt much better. However, in ranting against her Winnieness once, I parroted one of her lines from the show in her piping little wishy-winnie voice: “Keeviiiin, I don’t think that’s very niiiice!” and my best friend stared at me.

“Wow. That’s uncanny.” Thanks for the reassurance. But whatever my friends thought, friendly strangers remarked upon it and unfriendly co-matriculators shouted, “Wiiiiiinnie! Winnie Cooooooper!” after me in the halls.

Unfortunately, I have no pictures of myself at that age handy, but here is the face of my affliction, Danica McKellar:

To be fair, I think I wore my hair like that occasionally in the 80’s, too. It was an evil time for hairstyles.

Luckily, as I grew older the Winnie problem abated. The last time I distinctly remember hearing the familiar refrain was my freshman year at college, walking to a movie on Halloween with a friend. Some members of the University of Chicago football team were skirmishing in the field whose boundary I walked, and one stopped dead and pointed. “Dude! That chick looks just like Winnie Cooper!” They hooted at me until I passed, and it was not until the middle of the movie that I realized I should have said, “Great costume, huh?”

That was the first time I’d heard the name of my old nemesis in a long time. The new comparisons I heard were more flattering: some people said I looked like Winona Ryder (whom my sister had long been told she resembled):

My cousin and aunt thought I looked like the maid in the 1993 Secret Garden movie (Mum and I watched it, and couldn’t see it — Mom thought I looked a bit like Mistress Mary Quite Contrary, though!); unfortunately, this is the only picture I could find of her:

Finally, a fiercely flattering few have said that I resemble these two fine ladies, both of whom are on my ‘If I Had To Look Like Someone Else’ list:

<img src=”img/articles/salma.jpg” alt=”Salma Hayek” title=” If you think I look like Salma Hayek, you are crazy, but nice.” class=”imageCenter” />

I don’t really think I live up to either comparison. This is a picture of me, albeit just one I took with a timer to show off a haircut:

So I was interested yesterday when in an e-mail exchange with a family friend I read:

I was thinking of you last night as we were watching West Wing (DVD’s – we never have our act together to watch things on anyone else’s schedule). The election night episode from season 4 (if you follow these things) had a young actress who looked remarkably like you.

Curious, I pulled up an episode guide for the show and scrolled down to the guest stars, thinking I’d imdb up any likely female names and peep their pictures. Third guest star, as Elsie Snuffin, Orange County Campaign Staffer…Danica. McKellar.

As I told you all long, long ago, I am addicted to shoes. Have been ever since the first time I saw a red patent mary-jane. Don’t plan on ever changing. And working on the Nike campus? Well, let’s just say that it’s strange that the words ‘Nike’ and ‘Enabler’ share only two letters.

My list of shoes, since posted, has changed: it should have included PVC knee-high boots (bought in college for a Catwoman costume) and probably vintage mustard sandals (from my mom) to begin with; I exchanged #4 for a smaller, updated pump/oxford of the same line; #19 has graduated to #20 and #21 has been jettisoned, along with #18, which pinched; and I bought have white Franco Sarto slide-pump-sandals (for my sister’s wedding), brown Doc Marten boots, and Nike running shoes.

That was before I came to Nike. My second week, I got free shoes. My third or fourth week, I went to the Employee Store for the first time. I’ve gone again since. I now have [img/articles/free.jpg|image|Nike Free] training shoes of a delectable deep raspberry not currently on the market; Air Illusion tennis shoes (#25 wore out and hurt like the heebies); silver [img/articles/street_maxcat.jpg|image|Street Maxcat]s just for fun (“They’re like…SUPERHERO SHOES!” exclaimed sister sledge); black patent Cole Haan (Nike’s luxe subsidiary) things which are the love child of a ballet slipper and a surfer shoe; [img/articles/shox_rhythmic.jpg|image|Shox Rhythmic] (you try telling a shoe ‘No, no, I want to pass up my only chance in life to be a Badass Dancing Princess!’) and [img/articles/air_rift.jpg|image|Air Rift]s, which are a sort of odd sandal/shoe thing with tabi toes (NINJA FEET!). Why yes, I do set spending limits before entering the Employee Store! Otherwise this list would be much, much longer!

At any rate, Nike is a wonderful place to love shoes. Certainly I think people who call it a ‘shoe company’ are oversimplifying, since while the business started there, I do sit several yards from people designing watches and sunglasses. However, never have I seen so many people watch so many feet. I walk along watching people’s feet…they walk along watching my feet. My boss remarked on two different pairs of shoes I wore last week; my supervisor noticed immediately when I wore the Rifts for the first time yesterday. When I had my Frees, before almost anybody did, people I didn’t even know would ask me about them. What’s-Her-Toes noted my shoes (the Cole Haan hybrids) earlier and said, “Oh, those are Gordon’s work…he’s such a nice guy, as well as a great designer.” Yesterday Loose Leaf Tea Guy (can you tell I know him from the break room?) remarked on my Rifts, and asked whether they were comfortable. He doesn’t even work in footwear! The guys want to kibbitz about shoes here! I’m in heaven!

At orientation, the first week, the Adecco lady said, “While they can’t require you to avoid wearing competitor’s apparel, they request it. Main competitors would be Adidas, Reebok, and Columbia Sportswear.” She said, “Of course, it’s not reasonable to expect you to buy a new jacket or whatever…” a young man interrupted, “What if my only shoes are Adidas?” She looked thoughtful and said, “Well, try to cover them with your pants legs.” (I am not making this up.) I thought she was crazy. I mean, I love shoes, but how many people will notice the marque aux trois bandes, really? I think, as I sit in the campus coffee shop watching the swooshes bob past and noticing someone check out my Maxcats, that the answer is, ‘many’.

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

The woman across the broad metal desk from Marika had a long thin face, a nose so sharp it seemed to search between the air molecules for indiscretions, and a very dubious expression.

“Miss…”

“Stjärnasdotter,” Marika brightly repeated for the third time.

“Precisely,” Ms. Sabine Prothess, the Associate Operations Director of Benefit Intake Flow said, with a twist of her thin lips. “Your case, Miss… is quite unusual.” She made the word ‘unusual’ sound as if it meant ‘putrescent’.

“I didn’t think it was unheard of for fringe-dwellers to claim citizenship.”

“Not at all, not at all… however, they usually arrive on a Federated planet, rather than drifting into a shipping lane, and they generally are of an age of majority.”

“I am of an age of majority!”

“The age of majority, Miss, is 17.”

“Yours may very well be, but I’m quite major at 14. And you didn’t say ‘of the age of majority’, you said ‘of an age of majority’. Among my people, that age is 14. I’m of it.”

The AODBIF’s face seemed to get thinner to provide the material for her eyes to bulge in incredulity. “If you wish to avail yourself of the rights and privileges of citizenship, you are undertaking certain duties and constraints. Attempting to flout the Federated Systems’ rules and regulations is hardly a fitting first step!”

“Oh, I’m not flouting at all,” Marika said, with the same inpenetrable brightness. “It’s just that I’m an adult. I left my family and I can’t go back—it’s our custom! Even if I told you how to contact my parents, they wouldn’t take me back, because I’m not their responsibility. I’m mine.”

“Even leaving that aside for the moment,” Ms. Prothess sighed, “You can’t prove your age. Where were you born again?”

“On a ship. I belong to a nomadic people.”

“Just so. There’s no record of any Slarnas…Starass…of your family name anywhere in the Fedbanks.”

“Oh, I made it up.” At the AODBIF’s appalled silence, Marika continued, “We don’t have last names among my people, but the nice young man with the form-term said I needed one.”

“So you waltz in here…or drift, rather! Without a name, without proof of your birth — which you claim occurred on an undocumented transport — underage, and want full citizenship.”

“That’s right.”

“It can’t be done, Miss Sternersdachtyl. Our age requirements are quite strict. Anyone can undertake citizenship, provided they’re of age.”

“Anyone from any culture.”

“Of course! The Federated Systems pride themselves on their polycultural sensitivity and do not deny citizenship based on race, ethnicity, religion, creed, culture, custom, breeding practices, gravitational or other adaptation, or history of anthropophagy*. *Provided no future incidents occur.” She looked rather smug as she rattled off this dictum.

“But…I can’t be a citizen because in my subgroup, adulthood begins at a different time.” Ms. Prothess deflated and blanched, and Marika slid off her chair. “Very well, I suppose my business isn’t with your division any longer. The Office of Polycultural Equity Judication and Investigation is one floor down, isn’t it?”

The AODBIF’s face lengthened by the span of one dropping jaw, and Marika shrugged on her pack and reclaimed Pakriti from a large potted plant he’d been scaling in the corner. “You’ll be hearing from us again soon. Thank you for your time!”

Marika had already opened the soundproof panel in the frosted glass wall, and the sounds of the office without bubbled in as the woman gasped softly, “Not the OPEJIs, please! I’ll lose my job! Come back!”

Marika turned, and smiled pleasantly as the panel shut out the world once more and the ashen woman’s fingers flew over her terminal screen. “I can do a Specially Dispensed Accelerated Citizenship Form, and push an expedite… I’m sorry to ask, sweetheart, but could you spell your name, please? Yes, and…date of birth we have, skip those fields, yes, yes, full privileges, yes…” she looked up with a sickly imitation of a smile, “and you wanted to enroll in a resident school, you said?”

“Oh yes, ma’am.”

“Call me Sabine, dear,” she crooned. “Now, which school did you have your eye on? I can enroll you with the citizenship form, which should save you several weeks’ wait on your school ID.”

“Junior Space Academy, Sabine.” Marika reclined dangerously in the tasteful slate office chair. “I want to be a Fed.”

Part 5