A Mendacious Account of a Mouse-changing Moment

If none of this [aimless behavior of an insane Mouse] leads you to question your belief in the sanity of God’s created world, perhaps you ought to step back for a moment and try to see the world, not as it is (whatever that is), but as I saw it, as the poet saw it when he cowered there on the pier as the only character in a story written by the events of his own history. Try to see the world as the coffin that it is, for that’s what the poet saw when he and a hundred others stood one moonless night on the concrete pier, watching your sane world, without a thought in its head, deliver of its blue-white perfect self a blood-red sky bending from the rim of the earth toward the starry zenith. The apparition, too real to be the product of deluded eyes, spread its lunatic glare from edge to edge of the northern sky, filling the air with the promise of certain death. Many of the people on the pier were sorely afraid, some crying, shedding repentant tears and beseeching deliverance from their risen Messiah.

Ignorant of the cause of the coloring sky, the curious poet imagined the swamp lands, and perhaps all the lands north of Mobile were burning. The horizon seemed ablaze, the red glow slowly creeping upward as the inferno swallowed the world. The poet felt no fear, only a morbid satisfaction. This is good, he thought, the end of civilization, a new kind of end, an end to the embarrassment of dying alone.

But a girl, standing apart from the crowd, seemed to feel no fear, a beautiful girl dressed in red, with course dark hair, eyes of deep-ocean darkness, lips tinted by the burning sky. She stood at the edge of the pier nearest the approaching holocaust, a red knit cap pulled loosely over her ears, hair hanging in straight lines from beneath the cap and pushed forward across her shoulders. She was tall for a girl, with delicate hands softly lying on the railing of the concrete pier, hands as gentle as the touch of Aurora’s breath.

“It’s the Northern Lights,” she said, whispering so only he could hear. “They’re seldom seen this far south.”

Their eyes met, and without thinking to do so, he smiled, the accidental smile happening first, the thought that it might serve to make her believe that he knew all along the nature of the blazing sky, distantly second.

“You’re the man at the school aren’t you?” she asked. “I saw you on the porch last week, reading Spinoza.”

His mother worked as the live-in manager of the dormitory and dining room of Fairhope’s famous private school; and, yes, he supposed he was, “the man at the school,” but only looked at the girl in disbelief.

“What do you do there all day? Just read?”

It was summer. All the dormitory rooms were vacant, except the one he occupied.

“Read? Yes. Just read.”

She moved closer and looked north into Aurora’s light. “It came before. Ten years ago. Mrs. Horne told us about it. I’m not so bright; I just remembered her words.”

“Mrs. Horne?”

“She teaches at the school, history and anything else they ask. She knows everything.”

Yes, Mrs. Horne. His mother had spoken of her. A bright woman, three grown children. A Unitarian. His mother distrusted Unitarians.

“Do you go there?” he asked. The words crept out. She was too young, he thought, to be feeling about him what she seemed to be feeling.

She paused for a moment and cocked one eyebrow, as though deciding whether to answer him truthfully.

“Yes,” she said. “This will be my last year.” She lowered her eyes and asked: “Don’t you want to know how I knew you were reading Spinoza?”

When she first mentioned the book, the question crossed his mind but passed through without leaving an impression.

“Yes, how did you know?”

She smiled impishly. “Your mother told me.” Then she turned abruptly and, with no apparent further interest in the Aurora Borealis, walked from the pier, proceeded up the steep hill ascending from the beach, and disappeared.


Perhaps you see nothing unusual about a manifestation of the Aurora Borealis ten miles north of the Gulf of Mexico; nothing unusual about a beautiful girl feeling an instant affection for a relatively plain looking insane man; nothing unusual about a man standing in the darkness of an accidental planet welcoming destruction for himself and all of humankind; nothing strange that the softness of the touch of the girl’s voice suddenly turned the man away from thoughts of eternal silence.

If you thought those things, you’d be right. There’s nothing at all unusual in any of that. This kind of miracle happens somewhere on Earth every minute of every hour of every day. Nothing unusual at all.