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The Nursery Rhyme News ™
TRIO OF BLIND MICE SUE FARMER’S WIFE
Mice Claim Malicious Wounding; Farmer’s Wife Says Mice At Fault
A trio of blind mice filed suit in Mother Goose Superior Court today against a woman identified only as “The Farmer’s Wife,” claiming she is responsible for the loss of their tails. In her defense, the Farmer’s Wife has said while the incident was an unfortunate accident, the mice were at fault.
Eek, Squeak, and Algernon Phineus Persephony IV, Jr., the blind mice, are seeking unspecified damages for both physical injury and mental distress. Aside from the pain of the actual tail severings, all three have been seeing psychologists since the incident, and two are taking anti-depressant cheeses.
“Squeak is taking this the hardest,” Eek told reporters. “Ever since that day, he’s been saying he feels like going out and finding a mouse trap and ending it all. Folks don’t seem to understand what this is putting us through. They say, ‘oh, it’s just a tail, you don’t need it.’ But hey, we were born with the things, so they obviously serve some function, okay? And aside from that, losing a tail is a horribly disfiguring thing. If someone had gone up to three blind humans and cut their noses off, there’d be a huge outcry. It’s exactly the same thing. We’re not lizards, you know, our tails don’t just grow back.”
The mice charge that on June 16, they were simply feeling their way along the wall space with their canes when they came to a hole in the wall that led out into the house. Their sense of smell, which has been heightened since they lost their vision, picked up what appeared to be a sharp cheddar odor coming from the room. In fact, the Farmer’s Wife was in the room, munching on Cheez Puffs – this much is agreed upon by both sides. But the stories differ from there.
“If only we’d known it was Cheez Puffs instead of real cheese, this whole thing could have been avoided,” Eek remarked. “We don’t eat Cheez Puffs. We don’t even know if that’s real cheese on them or what. I mean, if it’s real cheese, why do they have to spell it ‘Cheez?’ Probably because they can’t legally identify it as the substance we all know as ‘cheese.’ At any rate, we entered the room, looking for the cheese.”
The mice claim they made their way up onto a counter and were headed in the direction of the cheese odor when Algernon suddenly screamed. “We heard this ‘whack’ and he screamed in pain and yelled ‘Run!’ to us,” Eek said. “I turned around and heard another whack and then Squeak was crying, ‘Whyyyy? Whyyyy?’ The next thing I know, I run into something hard that disoriented me. I heard another whack and felt my tail detach. Then the pain came.”
The mice were bleeding heavily but Algernon had learned in a first-aid class to apply pressure to the wound, and the three managed to squeeze their tail stumps with a back leg while they fled on the other three legs. As they ran, they claim, they heard the Farmer’s Wife laughing, and allege she yelled “Ha! See how they run!”
The three were able to get to Jack B. Nimble Memorial Hospital, where they were given blood transfusions donated from some moles who were in the Emergency Room waiting for a friend and who empathized with the plight of the blind mice. “It’s hard enough being blind underground, like us, with people gassing you and crushing your tunnels, and putting beepers in all over to try to drive you out,” said one mole, identified as Digsy. “Now even the sightless top-dwelling rodents have to worry about things like carving knives coming at them. Where will it end?”
The hospital has received many flowers for Algernon, who lost the most tail in the run-in. Algernon, a mouse of above-average intelligence, says he “feels dumber by the day since I lost my precious tail.” He punctuated this comment by involuntarily letting out a loud “Durrrr!” (the common phrase of all well-known stupid characters) and then broke down in tears.
The Farmer’s Wife tells a different story. She claims that she was eating her Cheez Puffs and practicing along with the television show Wok With Yan, in which Yan was producing sushi. Her eyes on the television, she claims she grabbed the three mice thinking they were furry chunks of red snapper, and before she realized it she had chopped the tails off of all three.
“They’re lucky I didn’t slice them all to bits,” she says. “They shouldn’t have been up there on my carving board in the first place. I can’t be to blame for this. I heard these squeakings and looked down and these three tailless mice with canes were running off. Have you ever seen such a sight in your life? It totally ruined our sushi dinner that night. I’d have given the tails back to be reattached, but I couldn’t find them anywhere on the counter. Later, I realized I had absently rolled them into three of the spring rolls we had eaten.”
As for the mice’s claims that she laughed at and taunted them on their way back to the wall, she says, “That’s simply not true. I didn’t say anything of the sort. I don’t know if they’re lying or if maybe they heard the television and thought it was me. It’s sometimes hard to understand Mr. Yan, and I think I recall him referring to the spring rolls at that point, saying, ‘See how they fun?’”
A date for trial was set for February 18. The three mice are also suing the Hickory Dickory Dock Clock company, claiming that their blindness was caused when they had run up one of the company’s clocks. The clock struck one, the mice ran down, but they claim the timepiece’s swinging pendulum struck each of them in the head as they passed, dislodging their optic nerves and rendering them sightless. The company’s only public comment was that it has always taken the optic nerves of mice into consideration when designing its clocks, and feels that adequate safety measures were in place at the time of the alleged accident.
© 2005 Scott Teel
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