Soft belly.

I jumped into bus 103A, showed my fake ticket quickly enough for it to seem real and made my way to the back. Winter was starting to bite my cheeks.

When blood found its way back to my fingers the gloves became too hot. I removed them. It was after a few seconds of rubbing my newly warmed hands with each other that I remembered that mouse.

Lorenz took the mouse out of his sterile cage and laid the animal in the bench. Hold the head with the tip of your finger and pull the tail. Snap. The spinal cord detaches from the brain and the mouse is killed instantly. Painlessly. Cervical dislocation, its called. Lorenz had done this many times.

Snap. Turn them around. Rip the belly skin open and cut through the abdomen to harvest the organs. Heart, duodenum, spleen, thymus, thyroid. You name it. Lab mice are inbred so they look even more alike than you would expect.

That day, for some unknown and irrelevant reason, Lorenz dropped the mouse in the floor.

The creature must have been amazed with all that space. Millions of times larger than the cage he had lived all his controlled and sterile little life. Space to run, as far as the eye could see. Or maybe not. Some strains, like this particular one, are albino and the mice can barely see. Still, he went nowhere. He made absolutely no attempt to run for his life.
Lorenz picked it up. Snap. The soft belly skin opened. Almost no blood shed.


As I stroked my hands I felt the softness. Too soft, almost as if they'd never been used. Like a belly of a lab mouse.
I have had a perfectly nice controlled safe life. My muscles are soft. My body has no scars. I do not know how to hunt or grow food. In my head, mere shadows of ideas on how to build a shelter.

A cannon being used as a pot to grow flowers. That's me.
If someone dropped me in the real world I would probably wait to be culled.