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his tiny head with her finger as she fed him crumbs of Camembert cheese, which is pretty pricey, even in mouse portions, especially for a child on a fixed allowance of seventy-three cents a week.
    Then one day the girl got cancer. Her father, a doctor, administered the chemo immediately, but it was too late. She died that day. There was so much to do between all his weeping and grieving, so many arrangements to make—flowers, a titanium casket, a suitable poem—it was a while before the father remembered Teabag at all. The poor mouse had been weeping, too, going hungry in his cage. The girl had left no instructions for his care.
    Nothing for it now, the father thought. He was a busy man, this doctor, much in demand. Rich people depended on his barbiturate
prescriptions. He took Teabag’s cage to the sidewalk, raised the metal door.
    “Good-bye, little fellow,” he said.
    Teabag wandered the neighborhood. The bigness of things was ever so frightening, all those bicycle wheels and curb grates and trash pails, the awful percussion of shoes, those pounding wing tips, high-tops, boots, not to mention the singles bars and how do you talk to women, anyway?
    Teabag found an upended paper cup near the minimart, scurried inside. There in the cool dark of the cup he squeaked out the name of the dead girl again and again, licked at flecks of coffee dried on the walls of his ready-made cave. The flecks made him nervous. He had a sad nervous hole in his heart. Now, suddenly, he felt himself being lifted upward. His paper shelter swiveled in midair. Teabag gazed into a pair of eyes the color of stale filberts, slivers of which the little girl had also fed him on occasion. The face around the eyes was bathed in blood.
    “I’m Fontaine,” said the face through its viscous red web. “Why do you weep, little mouse?”
    Teabag started to tell this creature Fontaine about the little girl, her father, the Camembert, the chemo.
    “Stop!” said Fontaine. “I don’t want to hear it!”
    “But it’s all true,” said Teabag. “It’s what happened to me.”
    “That’s not the point,” said Fontaine. “It’s not celebratory, see? It’s too negative. It’s even kind of sick. Chemo? Camembert? It makes no sense!”
    Whereupon Fontaine squeezed the paper cup. Mouse guts squirted to the pavement. Our poor hero was now but a smear of fur, even the grief pinched out of him.
    Well, Catamounts, I hope you enjoyed my little “meaningless” story.
    Tell it to the tots. They’re brighter and braver than you may care to believe.

A Sort of Forlorn Smirk
    FELINES OF THE EAST, I rejoice to announce the birth of a spanking new bank balance, courtesy of Penny Bettis at the cola outfit. The check was cut last week and now I’ve got a cupboard full of noodles, reasonable wattage in every room. Is this perhaps what it’s like for some of you more respectable Catamounts, with your pension plans and golden parasails, that sense of sated languor, as though Fate, suddenly, and without solicitation, had offered up her stippled shins for your tongue’s worship?
    Not too shabby.
    This must be how our very own Phil Douglas feels. Philly Boy, congratulations on your continued success at Willoughby and Stern. You’ve always been a persistent guy, Phil, a real plugger, whether the task at hand was to find a hole in rival Nearmont’s vaunted line or a fag to bash after the Friday night game. Though not the most talented athlete at Eastern Valley (this honor obviously belongs to varsity deity Mikey Saladin) you were always the most brutal and
adamantine of Catamounts, an avatar of the jock warrior code, if you will, which I’m sure you will.
    I’m also fairly certain at least a few of our contemporaries shared my fantasy of cornering you in Eastern Valley’s dank shower room and firing a hollowpoint round into your skull. We could picture the startlement in your eyes, the suck and flop of your dead-before-it-hits-the-floor body hitting the floor, your