Dinner was finished and a few more hours passed, everyone cleaning up and having gone to bed.
I laid there, my hands folded behind my head, reflecting on the day's activities. It was the same usual, repetitive, and pointless thing that we always engaged in.
Delicious servings of food for breakfast, lunch and dinner, supposedly blessed by Mother's prayer to her God that didn't exist. Cheesy and Sharp battering in the background about something stupid, like food or won Dratsmate. Mother's scare stories of the wild animals outside that attacked her and her Family in her younger years, et cetera, et cetera. After having endured hours of what felt like torture to me, my social battery had become drained, and now here I was. Laying on my back, looking up at the ceiling in my deepest thoughts, unable to sleep while everyone else slept soundly.
It wasn't just the over whelming similarity of the days that exhausted me. It was nights too.
For the past few nights, I knew nothing about sleep. My mind couldn't stop thinking about my future, my heart couldn't stop worrying about what would become of me. No matter what, I couldn't shut my brain off. The questions came like heavy rain pouring down on me. And it was the same questions, over and over, and over, again.
Would I be stuck in this place forever? Was life on the outside world really that scary? Would I die a terrible death as soon as I got out of there, like most of my mother's family?
"So if I go out there, I'll be killed. If I stay in here, I'll rot away from boredom. I'll be damned either way..." I breathed slowly, feeling the air escape my lungs.
Breathe Burrow, breathe. Your overreacting, I thought calmy to myself.
Mother's false stories were an over exaggeration, a fallacy. She was just trying to keep you in a cage. It's impossible that all that existed out there was nothing but bloodshed and fear. When I snuck out at night and gazed through the infinity of the night sky, it all appeared to be so breathtaking. Everything was amazing. The lush, canopied slopes that rose and curved in the distance...The cool breeze that made the leaves on those tall, lengthy trees sway in the wind. The white, cotton clouds that floated across the horizon...The moon came up and stood in the air, making everything around it so bright and colorful. The way the green spikey things on the ground jotted out, on those slim, thin stalks. They had the strangest colored leaves perched on them with many variations, cobbled up together in a small patch of soil directly under the clear eye. Some were water blues, some were reds, some were lavenders, they were some colors that I didn't even know the name of. Some of them were round and yellow, with slender stalks pushing out of their middles. Others were flurry, fluttery and loose around their edges, others weren't round but had a peculiar shape that was hard to describe. Then there were the fruits that were high up in the trees.
There was an apple tree at the front of the yard, to the right of the clear eye, leading to a grassy pasture that occupied the front of the Giants yard; a hoard of trees was behind that one Apple tree, leading to a forest encompassing its entirety.
The tree was loaded with red, big juicy apples, in fact it was packed with so much of them that they were falling off the trees and rotting away on the ground.
The birds were having a field day with the fruits, swarms of them flying up nonchalantly and having at them how they felt like. Those birds. Flying away to the furthest distances, up in the air. To other cities, to other trees, to wherever they wanted.
''Hmmm...must be nice...." I sighed, pushing my cheek against my hand.
It was unfathomable the amount of freedom those things had. They could just, get up and fly away like that. Whenever they wanted..and here I was stuck in this Hell.
"I just want to climb the top of the biggest tree..meet new friends. Chase up and down walls, climb fences. I want something new...I need to get out of here" I said to myself, feeling so good that I was finally able to acknowledge that feeling out loud for the first time.
I heisted my head up to see if anyone was awake. Sharp had his back turned to me as usual, crumpled up into a fetal position on my right. Cheesy was to the far end, on his back with his plump belly exposed, two hindlegs cocked up into the air. He sleep talked every night, his snore bouncing off of the walls and echoing; It was already hell forcing sleep with an unsettled mind. The fact that he snore made things all the worse.
I turned my head up to Mother, whose nesting was at the front of ours. She was cuddled up cozier than ever; her body moving up and down slowly as she breathed in sleep, her head rested on her hands like a pillow, tail curled up around the curve of her body.
"Sleep tight suckers" I taunted lowly, rising and easing myself off the cotton. I rested my feet softly on the wooden floor as I made one step behind the other, making sure to be painstakingly quiet.
Thrusting my tail up in the air so that it wouldn't drag across the floor while I walked, I tiptoed across the space, passing all three of them as they slept away. I got closer and closer to the doorway that led out into the Kitchen, a stream of white light seeped through it, being only three or four steps away from my sweet escape.
So, I braced forward and in one sweep I speed through the door, a whiff of silent breeze following behind me. I tugged forward, entering the wind blasting through the spaces of my whiskers. It was a breezy night.
Entering the Hallway, I stood and observed the huge space in front of me.
A roomy kitchen with polished, wooden floors, that had a tiled island counter in the middle of it; thousands and thousands of feet above me, and even though it took a second to climb up to the counter, it was so towering that whenever the Giant stood over it, it reached him by his waist. And he was extremely tall.
Further out there was a wall that separated the Kitchen and led to the living room, a red couch seated in the middle of it with two clear eyes to the left and right of it. I zoomed past the island that was in the middle of the kitchen first, flying across the floor, going past the border wall.
I was in the living room now. So, I clambered my way up the arm of the couch, making my way up to the ledge of the clearing eye.
Luminous, glowing light penetrated through the transparent shield, the moonlight highlighting my seat below it. It was almost as if the moon was inviting me to rest, to sit and bask in its beauty.
I smiled warmly, proceeding to take a seat by the ledge;
Staring out the clearing eye into the abyss of the night.
The Moon was up there, a dazzling, brilliantly lustrous globe of white light, centered in the stars, her striking image candescent against the black void of the night sky. There were these other smaller, twinkling specks of light that decorated the sky, with a few clouds levitating past it.
The scenery was surreal and dreamlike, an absolute fantasy.
Watching my hand rise in the air, I pressed my palms against the hard, clear material of the clear eye, wishing that I had the power to melt through it, and escape to the outside world. The jealousy for those came back for those bastard birds.
Why couldn't I have been a bird instead of a rodent? I would fly to the highest places and look down on the world as my Kingdom, much like the moon and the sun did.
"I'll get out of this damned prison and live freely. Even if I must leave my family behind...even if it kills me!!" I stood firmly in my affirmation, in my promise to myself, feeling a sense of elation racing through my body.
Somehow (though I had no idea how) I would have to convince Mother, Cheesy and Sharp that it was time for us to move on. To get out of this holding before it was too late. Who knew what that Giant was thinking? Who knew what he had planned for us? All the poisons and traps Mother showed us that he set.
My spirit needed adventure. Something new, a fresh occurrence that had never taken place in my life before! My spirit grew tired of pacing endlessly back and forth in the same reality all the time, and though I was thankful for the space that Mother had managed to provide us with, I stood so immensely weary of seeing the same four wooden walls that would never belong to me. At the end of the day, we were squatting in the Giant's place, in this strange world that Mother reared us in, and even though it was home, it didn't feel very homely.
We were not free.
How could it be that our lives had been to run away and hide from him when he appeared? Was that all we would spend the rest of our lives doing?
This was no way to live.
"I will convince them. I will convince them I just have to make them see the bigger picture...I can have a life of adventure and still carry my family with me..." I was pacing back and forth on the ledge now, playing with the short furs under my chin and contemplating. I spun my head to the far end of the room, looking straight at the blue painted wall that our home was hidden inside.
"I've got to go home. It's getting late. After this one last glance at the moon..." I closed my eyes and inhaled, exasperated by my stream of thoughts. Plumping down back against the ledge under the clear eye, I continued admiring the moon.
.....................
**Mince stood behind the Island counter in the Kitchen
"Convince us? Convince us of what..." Mince was hiding behind the Kitchen counter, looking at her son quietly admiring the midnight sky on the window ledge. It was beautiful indeed, but what was Burrow on about this taking his family with him??
Taking the Family with him where?? How would he do that?? Where were they going to go? That boy didn't realize that he was still but a babe. Burrow didn't know what it was like to have everyone around you die, as you watched helplessly, unable to do anything about it. He had never experienced days, even weeks of nonstop hunger, dehydration and suffering.
Many nights had Mince fallen asleep due to hunger induced fatigue. If there was no food to eat, what else was there to do but sleep?
Getting up every day and having to run until your feet hurt from being chased over logs, under bridges, diving in water just to get away from a cat. Sitting under the trunk of a tree in the same spot, waiting and hoping and praying that those birds would stop searching for you and fly away.
"That ungrateful ingrate! Look at the comfort I raised him in. The comfort, the luxury! And he dares to question for more. The nerve!" Mince cursed to herself, her back against the cupboard of the island as she continued to hide away. She exhaled and rolled her eyes, peeking her head out and looking at Burrow again.
He was still in the same spot, staring up intently at the moon like it was the only thing that existed. Burrow leaned his head up against his hand his eyes were sloppy and lifeless, barely opened while his mouth turned over into a permanent frown. Come to think of it, Burrow's face had always been in a frown of late. He wasn't interacting and talking to us the way he used to, he wasn't smiling. He wasn't even laughing at his brother's shenanigans like he used to...
Burrow was not himself anymore. He was nothing but a husk of what he used to be. Of course, he was still responsible and reliable, more so than his siblings. But there was no joy in anything that he did.
Realizing this, a heaviness settled in Mince's chest, a wave of regret creeping upon on her conscience. She began to think deeply, reasoning that maybe she wasn't handling this the right way.
Is it me??Was I the one that caused this soul crushing sadness within my son?
They were young bucks after all, they wanted to go out and explore, to make a Family, to have experiences. And they couldn't stay with me forever. At some point they would have to leave me and make life on their own. I couldn't protect them forever either...
"No. Nope! Life is hard out there. They are still children, still young still amateur. They need my protection as a Mother..." she snapped out of her empathetic thoughts instantly, and just as quickly, she sunk back to them.
I am protecting them. I am protecting them. I am protecting them...Mince kept affirming her morale repeatedly to herself, determined to stick to her virtue. Then, she let out a huge sigh.
"Am i...protecting them from the world? Or.." her mouth began to dry as she struggled to mutter the words.
"AmI hiding them from life?"