Deep in the Fields by Daniel Wu

Dipper, a field mouse, was standing on the windowsill, scanning the kitchen for anything that he could steal for his brother and himself. He was about to give up and suffer one more day of starvation when he saw some crumbs on the counter that might have been leftovers from the owner’s breakfast. I listened carefully for the jingle of the farm owner’s cat’s collar. He heard it upstairs in a room. Good, he thought. He carefully leaped down from the windowsill and landed as quietly and gracefully as he could. He paused for a moment to listen for the cat. He hears the cat upstairs still and quietly tip-toed over to the counter to get the crumbs. Just as he was about to start nibbling on the biggest crumb when the front door creaked open and the farm owner stepped in. Dipper scrambled towards the window sill, but slipped on a small crumb and fell to the floor of the kitchen. Hurting very bad and barely conscious, Dipper lay on the ground. The man, shocked at the mouse’s presence, walked over to Dipper.

The man, genuinely concerned about the mouse’s condition, picked Dipper up gently and put him in a small peach basket, where Dipper immediately fell unconscious.

When Dipper woke up, he had a severe a headache and all he saw was red. What he didn’t know, of course, was that it was a peach. Dipper squirmed a little bit and immediately, his leg started screaming in pain. Overcome with pain, the mouse fell unconscious again. The next time he woke up, he was laying on a paper towel. Right where his leg was, there was a small splotch of blood. He heard some weird, angry voices, and looked up. He saw the man and a little girl making the weird noises and waving their hands around. Finally, the girl stopped and, with very heavy footsteps, walked away. The man picked Dipper up and set him on the ground, next to the cat. The last thing Dipper saw was the spurt of blood when the cat’s teeth connected with his throat, then everything went black.