"Timothy The Mouse"
by
Timothy Stillman
(a fable for anyone who still has the courage to believe in "once upon a time.")
Timothy the Mouse, naked in the glow of the moon winter night. Enveloped in the darkness that had a white patina to it. Ghostly night in mid November. And Timothy, called a mouse, because he was small and scared and shy and black of hair while white pale of skin, was off on the hill side looking at his favorite position--upward.
Up where the cold gales blow. Up in the stirs of stars swinging around. Night and light and Timothy who was a little parallax of arms held up high to the moon. Catch me, moon, catch me and never let me go, he cried silently. As he jumped up higher and higher. Slim flanks bouncing their bones. Little cock jiggling. Other nights and frights and sights had anyone in them but Timothy the Mouse.
Boy of face watercolored and gentle. Boy of eyes blue skies. Boy of summer here in mid November with Thanksgiving close at hand. And night the way it goes when you're young and bizarre and filled with far off laughter that is nothing more than time. Time laughing. The true timeless time. When no one else hears it. When there are no gales of love in sight for Timothy the mouse.
Who wanted to be on the moon. Who wanted to be a participant in other lives that had never existed. A little mouse in the room. Hollow chest and lungs too weak to support him in much of anything like running, which was impossible for him to do. Or walking, which he did slowly. But not so at night, late, when jumping at the moon and his tiny chestnut balls bouncing against his body. All animated like a cartoon mouse name of Mickey and all linked with whatever was up there on the moon.
That paralleled little Timothy. Whose name was Tim for real. And who was poor for real. And who lived on the wrong side of the tracks. Timothy, little scion to a fortune of hurt. And the mouse who came to the night mountains of the sky along about every midnight. Who was paler than pale in the moon. Who was on the wrong planet. Who played too many tunes no one understood. For truth to tell, everyone was a little afraid of Timothy the mouse. He was far too--different.
He had an endearing smile when he smiled. A shy smile when he smiled. A sly smile when he smiled. He was encased in moon beams. And kids don't like it when they find a kid encased in moon beams. It makes them feel left out. Not that they would want that anyway. But still and all, possession of anything by such a runt of a kid they called "girly boy" because he had a girly way of walking, a girly air to him that sighed softly like he had always just finished being kissed, and they had not--possession, even of a moment of moonlight was wrong, as far as they were concerned.
Timothy gamboled in the moon glade. He danced and his lungs did not ache nor feel tired. His heart did not hurt as it did when he so much as crossed the floor at home or at school. Here the moon grabbed his elbows and the cold wind blew and grabbed at his hips and the night was a cathedral. He was a boy bow in the midnight air. Where Timothy T. Mouse had come to pray. All the time the cobble stone sky was run upward and downward by meteors and asteroids and stars that moved in their trajectory for Timothy T. Mouse, Esquire, and no one else at all.
Timothy ran his hands with their long lingering fingers and square finger tips over his bony body and he loved himself. He loved how he felt. All tight and full of bone and full of muscles that he squeezed in his legs and his arms and his ass and his groin. He was all of a part was sensitive pensive Timothy. When the night came to play on him. And the stars danced in their bright bones, because he was there. Because there was the moon and its friends saying look down at Timothy and look up, because he should be where we are. And marvel at him.
Thus, naked boy calling exhalation to the stars with himself. Thus, his hands holding his dainty cock hard to the night sky. Saying in itself here is all the romance any world would need. Here is all the Little Prince any asteroid would love. Here stands willing friend to be of Pooh and Tigger and Christopher Robin and the Grinch too. Come hands soft in the glow air. Come hands entranced in the webs of wind he held between his fingers.
Timothy should wear a dress. Timothy should be Minnie Mouse. He's a girl. Look at that long hair. Look at those long eyelashes. Look at that face, looks like Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. I'd be ashamed to be Timothy. I'd be ashamed to be a boy like that. And a broken boy. A boy who can hardly breathe. A cripple like Timothy. How do you live with yourself, Timothy T. Mouse? Minnie Mouse? Don't you feel like you're a leaking house boat sinking in the waves? Glub glub glub.
And Timothy threw his arms to the sky. And the sky caught the bushel of insults and the bushel of pain and the bushel of laughter, from the boys, and from the girls who thought Timothy looked even prettier than they, and they did not like that one little bit. Timothy nightly threw the day's barbs up at the giants in the sky. Who caught them and turned them into ice comets. And then threw them out into space, deeply and outward like arms of nothing at all. That did not count.
And Timothy counted in the stars. He skated on their ice flows. He ran up ice mountains and was the tallest boy in the universe. He ran his hands over his convex abdomen and his weak defenseless hollow chest and he was worlds inside and outside. He was everything the universe turned on and depended on. He was the center of everything. The star of everything. He was not the sun. However. He was the moon and the moon loved him so.
Because no one else loved Timothy. His mother tired easily and most easily especially because of Timothy, who could dissolve into tears at the drop of a moment that she never noticed was there. But a moment that took her son Tim's breath away. Took the heart in him to thumping so hard he felt he had a base drum in there. And he got so scared. He got scared deeply between his legs. He got scared his peter, as his mother called it, was going to fall off.
And then he could not use it as a barber pole to climb to the Arctic in the sky way up there, a sky that had so many random glows in it. So many possibilities on planets, and swinging through the universe, this one and that one, on comets like his own private midnight train through all the countries that no one, including he, knew about. Life was up there in lack of breath. Life and brilliance and candles and Halloween. And Christmas. He read a story once. A father forget to get his daughter a Christmas present, so he gave her the universe they were rocketing through instead.
How that story chilled Timothy's spine. How that arched him now, thinking of it, as he knelt on the ground, on the cold brown sparse ground, that hurt his knees, for he was a delicate child. And he felt the space of himself between his tickly hips become the space of everything that was around him. He laughed his arms out and he almost fell, then caught himself. He laughed his legs and feet up off the ground and almost fell, then caught himself.
How good to be me, Timothy thought. Something he never thought anywhere but in his nightly revels. In the day time he was silent and withdrawn and leaf curled into himself. He was ashamed of his body and his mind and his heart and his lungs. He didn't know the children. They frightened him. Most were bigger than he was. Even the girls were bigger.
But at night, away from the hateful sunlight of the day, he was a friend of Icarus. The moon Icarus who knew that flying too near it on his wax wings would not kill him, but would free him. But on this earth, in the world of people: Timothy, where they came with the games. Timothy, where they tossed dodge balls at him. Timothy. where they ran the numbers on him and the little jokes and the laughs and the mean cold hands of them turned him round and round and found little use for him at all, at all.
But Timothy by himself was magic. Timothy was the friend of the stars. The giants of the sky. The giants who ran the hills of space and never got winded or hurt or fell down or socked around. Timothy loved no one, but the stars and the center of them, the moon, because they loved him back and they expected nothing of him but that he be Timothy. And mice ran the moon, as he called out silently in the big gusts of his big lungs and his heart that was safe and secure and beat as it was supposed to, "come for me, moon mice, come for me and let me taste moon cheese too!!"
His mother sighed over Timothy. Not as Timothy sighed, which made persons think he had just been kissed. But his mother's sighs meant Tim was not living up to expectations. Tim was not going to be the right kind of man. The correct kind of man. And Timothy was just a little moment in time on planet Earth. But Timothy of the stars was all the universe and he would live there and only there, forever and a day.
She, Mother?, Mom?, who was this angry harried sad lonely alone woman?, had read nursery rhymes and fairy tales to him when he had been much younger. All the fairy tales and rhymes had to do with the sky for some reason or other. There were cows jumping over the moon, and there was wishing on moonlight, and there were children who called water from the moon to cascade life into a friend so young and so dead it seemed forever. But magic said not so. Magic said cross the bow of the archer in the stars in the sky. And shoot the arrow like Timothy shot his cock, though nothing came out of it, how he loved to shoot it nonetheless. How good and safe and summery it made him feel inside.
Timothy. On the hillside of broken bow. On the hillside of broken children. The children who were like Timothy that he sometimes saw on TV telethons and did not connect them with him for they were much sadder, and they were far less fortunate, and it made him so angry that things were that way. Pray to God, his mother would adjure him. What God? he would think? A God who would cripple children and make them be in such torture and pain and die so young? What kind of God would be that way? So Timothy prayed to the moon and the stars and the dip of white lights that surged through the sky in crescent rainbows.
The sky was ancient and the sky was young in its being ancient. Children Timothy saw seemed so old. Their skin seemed grainy. Their faces seemed marked by such evil tempers and such sicknesses that did not seem to have names for them. Their faces were patchworks of skins that didn't seem to fit them. Eyes that did not meet the expectations of the mouths. Noses that did not meet the expectations of the ears. How sad they thought themselves so superior, Timothy thought. Why in the world did they?
And he lay his small delicate bony body down flat on the ground. The wind was bitterly cold and played with his spine and his hips that he jiggled back and forth as though there were seas under him and he was sailing on them and off the world, off into space. On his penis stiff rocket. Off into a moon glow that had nothing in it but time. And time was love. And time was everything. Because, you see, down here, Tim Redfield didn't have a lot of time left. Tim Redfield was dying. And the doctor and Tim's mother did not think that Tim Redfield knew it. Tim's teacher, giving him, his pills at the correct times of day, right in front of the class, which always took such cruel delight in his choking them down with water, made him blush and feel so stupid and weak and unmeant for life.
But Timothy the Mouse knew about the green cheese moon. And he knew about the apple pie sun. And he knew that if he lay on the ground. If he lay in the cold, without a stitch on. If he lay in enchantment with his penis hard as it could be till it almost went off by itself without his touching it or moving his body in any way at all, now, as he lay still, there was nothing he could not do. There was the gift of space. Given to Timothy the Mouse. Who did not need to hide behind Dumbo's big ears. Who did not have to close his eyes at night, in bed, after he climbed back into home and bedroom and pajamas and, had to pretend that fireworks were not going off inside him. Desire and delight in going away, away, soon and soon.
Dr. Dolittle riding past the moon on his giant Lunar moth, with Matthew Muggs sitting behind him, and their hats raised and hands waving down at little Timothy who so wanted to be with them. Who wanted to sing himself up to them and be forever blessed with their wisdom and their worlds that were so bright and brave and endlessly fun. Timothy lay on the ground and he popped. His little peter popped. And he lay his face on the side of the ground, and he sighed, just one time. Softly. Like he had just been kissed.
As the boy slept and slept deeper than he ever had before. His body relaxed and his eyelids closed on his black iris eyes. The long lashes protecting the eyes of Timothy the Mouse. The lashes saying you've seen enough of this world. You've seen enough of false time and the false, stupid persons in it. As trapezes of gold and silver swung down gently and gracefully from the sky. And the boy felt his penis saying farewell for the moment, Timothy Mouse, and shrinking under him. As his balls went back into their little warm body cavity. All saying, we will come back to play another day.
As his heart beat fast and faster and then stopped beating altogether. And the trapezes were of moon glow feathers and spider spun miracles lowered downward, and the night leaned over to Timothy the Mouse and the winter wind got colder and colder. And blew Timothy's long home cut hair in its path. As the night leaned closer into Timothy. And the moon reached outward its long white milk path to him and kissed him on the side of his cheek. For it had so kissed him many times before right in that exact spot.
The trapezes came closer and closer till they were hanging right over him and all round him. The wind picked up Timothy Mouse, still and tender and light as a leaf, and placed him, so delicately, so carefully, on one of the trapezes padded with goosedown dreams from a Hans Christian Anderson story about ugly ducklings and surprises in wait for them. Timothy's little defenseless behind bent over, to the stars and safe and secure. A little moon beam was Timothy. The stars threw off lights so bright they would have hurt the eyes here if anyone had been looking. The other trapezes gathered up the dreams of little Timothy, dreams he knew about, as well as dreams he didn't know about, and all at a single time, they and he were pulled up off the ground of winter.
And on the moon waited the most enchanting things just for him. Pooh and Tigger and Christopher Robin too. As Matthew Muggs called out to him (which Timothy heard, Timothy alive way up there, again, for the first time, breath of a different sort whispered into his lungs, by the sky night. For Timothy had been a friend to the night, which, unlike persons on Earth, never forgot a friend) "Halloo, Timothy. We're waitin' right here for you to get off the grandest elevator ever invented and meet up with your friends. Timothy, good lad. Job well done. You loved us always. And we'd be honored to shake your hand. Honored, indeed. You're a hero of ours."
Timothy in the sky. Smaller and smaller than even Tim Redfield. The earth which never had time for Timothy, who was too far up to even be seen by it now. Timothy in the sky, heading home. As he sailed closer and closer to the moon, which was not made of paper after all but of blue moondust just right for dancing a wild west shoot 'em up dance in, as Timothy started to breathe the Christmas feeling all around him and he opened his eyes just a bit. Then as he was gently placed, as by so attentive a lover, on the blue moon dust, he opened his eyes more and more. Round eyed, he was. And fascinated and entranced. And he smiled. Like he never had before. And sighed. As though he had been kissed by all the moon craters and moon mountains and the blue dust of the ragged old planet that needed him more than it needed anyone else who had ever lived.
And that much needed friend was one Timothy T. Mouse. He had cheese for breakfast that morning. Moon cheese. And if you've never had any, you should try it some time. It is delicious. He got to a certain fabled candy factory late in the afternoon, moon time, and the candy too was delicious. And he slept and danced and laughed and would never be alone again. Christopher Robin, personally, told him that.
And that's my story of one Timothy T. Mouse, Esquire. The mouse on the moon who got to wear Dr. Dolittle's tall hat and ride the Lunar moth with the good doctor and Mugs, and do all sorts of marvelous fanciful things.
Now don't you wish you could be Timothy T. Mouse, Esquire, too?
the end