Upon a time, one hole the little gray kitchen mouse had found, half finished. A corner of the refrigerator’s nook had grown lax with age. After a few wee-hours of nibbling, the mouse had made of the disjunction a proper crossing. Another hole, behind the range, the mouse made from scratch—a flurry of scratches, actually, and enough tooth-work to fill a whale’s mouth. (Not that the mouse had the tiniest idea of leviathan.) Under the kitchen sink, misfit pipes made passage a snap. Yet, this was the mouse’s least favorite route in and out of the walls. The bitter reek of rust and the musty aura of the plumbing—over them he’d take the back of the oven and a trace of gas any day. It was often warm there, between the baseboard and the giant white block with a semi-regular fire in its belly or on its mind. The hole behind the stove was as good as the mouse’s pet. Aside from gaps and crevices that might do in a squeeze, three holes seemed like a decent fit under an old man’s nose.

The old man had been a farmer and a husband. For many more years than a mouse might know, the old man had rented his fields and lived alone. Alone, except for a large cat, a Siamese-tiger mix who, for whatever reason as a cat might have, allowed the mouse to live un-harried under the old man’s roof. Perhaps so as not to draw attention to the old man’s severance from his land and its labors, the cat had let go its own chores. Even if not to the one running for his life, the jut-tailed chase of prey was largely a pretense anyway—what with bowls of water and kibble on the floor. Whatever a cat’s motives, to consider them no mouse will drop its misgivings when caught crossing a kitchen floor. On such occasions, this cat’s whiskers had taken to tilting at him in what might have been bemusement, but the little gray kitchen mouse was not prepared to pause at feline feet for a moment of old-age-driven camaraderie. Always scurried the mouse, even if never stirred the cat. It was possible the old man never noticed, not the action, the lack of it nor the holes.

From his favorite, the world looked small to the mouse. But it was safe there—cozy, even. And for fortune the occasional fallen morsel was hard to beat. Hard, but not impossible. One day, while the mouse was behind a wall, balled in sleep, the not-impossible occurred. The cat watched from the farmhouse’s small, green-painted concrete back porch. In a swirl of road dust and a scrape of gravel at the driveway’s mouth, the old man’s son and daughter-in-law and their young daughter arrived for a visit. A two or three day stay, judged the cat, from the number of bags being unloaded from the trunk of the hot, ticking car. The girl hopped from the bronze sedan’s back seat down onto the pea-stone and insisted that she was a big girl and could carry her own bag. And maybe she could have. But added to the jewelry box under her other arm, the small case proved too much for her upon the kitchen’s threshold. Yet it was the box that spilled—and tears, casting double-doubt on the girl’s earlier insistence.

Not gold or silver, diamonds, rubies or emeralds—none of these scattered across the kitchen linoleum. Instead of gems, minerals of another sort were that morning’s accidental indoor downpour. After plunging noisily to the floor, the drops that plied the wide tiles were shells. Under table and chairs—and behind an appliance—the sea’s debris skittered to rest. Sea cradles pink and blue, quahogs running the gamut of gray, limpets like elves’ caps, the pearly nautilus, the sea butterfly, urchins puffed and spiked and studded or flattened into dollars, periwinkle and whelk whose former inhabitants it would surprise a cat (or a mouse) to discover were a delicacy in certain quarters, the fan-shaped scallop with its rays like the sun’s, the cockle the conch and the cowrie—the little girl knew few of the names. The cat knew none.

Cats wonder at their mortal peril, of course. One may have only nine questions in its life—eight, really.

Despite such a hindrance to learning, this cat was too smart to waste curiosity on these remains. They were interesting, the cat had to admit, for how they spilled from a little girl’s box and made her cry. But they smelled—and sounded, faintly—of deep water. Whether pretending at danger, or hiding it, the shells impressed the cat as clever, as curiosity bait, as sure cause to be wary. These shells were just the sort of thing that made perpetual self-enforcement of disinterest a vital undertaking for cats. Weighing several incentives (if not instincts) the cat paid the shells less attention than she might a shadow upon a wall.

Still, it seemed not too risky to wonder what the mouse might wonder upon finding his favorite hole nearly blocked by a clever lump that had gone overlooked by the girl and her grandparent. Its escape of their notice didn’t surprise the cat. They never saw the mouse either, and it and the shell were roughly the same shape, size and color. The cat could almost imagine the shell crossing the hole to shelter.

That night, as his nominal nemesis lay unconcerned at the foot of the little girl’s bed, the gray mouse examined the strange deposit at his doorstep. Cats might cultivate nonchalance, but a mouse is forever plagued by “What” and “When” and all of their cousins. To the little gray kitchen mouse, the most curious thing about the shell was its appeal. The side of it that faced his hole was rough. In script plain for a little mouse to read, knobs and ridges upon the thing spelled out “Do not touch!” Dark spots on it might have been dried blood, but for the smell. The mouse didn’t know what the scent was, but he knew it wasn’t blood. At least, it wasn’t all of blood—maybe a part, but not all. Which part, though? It was hard to say, maybe because the sense of blood was deep inside the smell, and inside the mouse—near the pit that pumped his legs full of flurry in the face of an idle cat. The smell could have had to do with just the beginning of blood. Or only the end. Whichever, there seemed to be nothing immediate about the thing, and after much motionlessness on both sides of the hole, the mouse made the first move.

Twitching with indecision, he approached the shell. It remained still. And silent. The mouse crept closer by hairs until his whiskers brushed it. It was not alive. As much as a mouse can, this one now sauntered around the thing to its far side. There, at the sound of a dead thing’s voice, the mouse was frozen, mystified.

Rough and studded was its back, but the front of the thing, the curled and coiled opening from which came its voice, was smooth and pink and somehow a warm comfort and a cool balm in one. The thing did not actually speak, not like the mouse did, or the cat… or the farmer, for that matter. And yet, it was only silent if the mouse stopped listening. To even a mouse it was apparent that this was far cleverer than talk. He decided it might be clever of him to listen more closely. He laid his head against the thing’s hard, smooth, pink lip. The voice was smooth, yet rose and fell. It was soft, yet persistent. It was huge, yet only for one. It meant much, yet said nothing. The more of the song the mouse heard, the less he wanted to miss. Soon, like the faraway tide about which he knew nothing, the mouse was out, asleep, eyes full of sand.

Scurrying feet woke him with a start. It was morning, and into the kitchen hippity-hopped two pink bunnies, with the little girl on their backs. After them, the cat loped in.

“There’s one missing kitty. But I’ll find it.”

“It’s not for you anymore,” the cat said. As if to console her, he rubbed his fur against the girl’s legs, just above the bunnies. The fact that all she heard was Meee-owww made the cat no less correct. Too far back of the stove, the conch slipped the girl’s sight, as did the mouse crouched behind it. The bunnies conveyed the girl from the kitchen, and, possibly, the cat’s tongue to her, because on the way out she said,

“I guess it’s not for me anymore.”

Knowing this lot of cats, to be at once ignored and echoed by humans, the mouse’s relief was tinged with sympathy. As if one departure from instinct deserved another, the mouse nosed the shell through the hole and behind the wall. There, with his head against the gift’s pink lip he passed the day in a dream of warm sunshine and languid breezes.

Long after the girl had returned home, the gray kitchen mouse would still spend much time with his head against the conch, filling himself with its air. The rhythm was foreign to him (he was a kitchen mouse who had seen little else than the farmer’s house and not even all of that) but the flux was somehow intimate. In its pulse he felt his own. His joy swelled as the song rose, and his repose flourished in its ebbs. Unknown, tide was bliss.

There were times, however, when this source of pleasure became also a fount of confusion. The kitchen mouse sometimes wondered how he could feel so much, so many great things he’d never felt before, and yet know so little. Where did the voice come from? He was as sure as a mouse could be that no creature that might sing so was alive in the thing’s depths. And how, without words, did the voice reflect a part of him that until then he hadn’t known existed? Was he to the shell as the girl was to the cat? In time, as he kept listening, such questions washed over him harder and harder until finally

they began to erode his enchantment. As unable to continue without answers as he was to come up with any, the kitchen mouse decided to find some, at the possible cost of his life. He would ask the owl.

A certain twilight found the kitchen mouse standing outside under early stars, something he rarely did. He had even rolled the conch out of doors with him, something he’d never done. The kitchen mouse reeked of fear, but he didn’t try to conceal it. He knew his scent would bring the owl. He only hoped that he would see her before she saw him. As the night sky began to glisten in full, the kitchen mouse heard a rush of air. At first it was a sound not entirely unlike the one made by his prize. In an instant that could have meant eternity, the two were like night and day. Tremendous wings seemed to slice the air from all directions. Against the ground as hard and as much under and inside the conch as he could manage, the mouse urged himself. He might have been a slight rise of dirt, but dirt wouldn’t have felt talons in its fur, a hair’s width from flesh. The kitchen mouse’s heart pounded the dirt to dust. Barely could he cry, “Owl! Please! I have a question.”

From a branch the owl replied. “And why should I answer, my little dinner?”

“For the asking.”

Given the proper countersign, the owl now had no choice except to answer. But she knew how to make it sound like she did. “Very well then. Ask your question.”

Then, with the answer before him, or rather, in a tree a little above him, the kitchen mouse couldn’t think of the question. “What…” he finally managed, “… what is this?” meaning the shell of course. And, of course, the owl knew that. “Where does it come from? What is the song it sings?”

“Many questions for such a small thing. As you know to ask, I will tell.”

And she did.

The owl told the kitchen mouse all about the tiny conch, about its long-gone slimy inhabitant, about the many years time spent making it and about the great ocean’s roar forever echoed minutely in the shell’s hollow chamber. The kitchen mouse thought it incredible that the strain which had gained so sound a hold of him could be a mere measure of an opus orchestrated by a gigantic sea of which he’d never heard a drop. Imagining ecstasy, he thought of attending the performance.

“One more question please, owl. How can I find this sea?”

The owl turned her head a long way and laughed. “Little mouse, even I can’t say how you could accomplish such a thing. It would take you a month of following the setting sun before you reached it. Most likely, you would die along the way.” And with a dozen flaps of her great wings the owl was gone.

The next afternoon, with the sun barely begun on its descent, the kitchen mouse followed after, nudging the conch along in front of him.

Not so far from a month later as to make the owl in error, a weary kitchen mouse far from home stumbled down one final dune facing a vast ocean. It played his song, but with an intensity beyond his most fathomless and yawning dreams. The volume—the magnitude—was so great the little kitchen mouse felt afloat, buoyed by cloud, or miracle. His legs trembled. Leaving his conch at the dune’s foot, the kitchen mouse lay down on the sun-warmed shoals and basked in a tide of welcome. His journey had been long and far rougher than any mouse had ever endured. In a moment he was fast asleep.

A mouthful of saltwater choked the little kitchen mouse awake. In more than dream had he come to be immersed. The tide had entered while he was asleep and was now washing him out to sea. Vain struggling soon exhausted him. Before he was dashed for good beneath a breaking wave, the gray kitchen mouse heard, one final time, the song he’d discovered as his own, and cherished.

Back on the beach, a little girl collecting seashells had wandered ahead of her parents. At the bottom of a dune she found a tiny conch and, cupping it in her small hand she ran delighted back to her mother and father. “Listen Mommy!” she shouted over the crashing surf. “You can hear the ocean! You can hear the ocean!”

And indeed, a tiny roar could be heard.

By Michael Zivick 1959-2007