Yesterday, it all came back to me. About the day I was born, who I am, and what I have to do. All seven shadows of me.
It all started with a mouse who lived in a house. She was a mamma-mouse, who was carrying seven mice-lings in her belly. She would sit in her mouse-nest all day, while papa-mouse would go foraging for food. One day, papa-mouse found a big scrap of meat not far from the hole where they lived. He was very happy. Of late, finding food had become more and more difficult with every passing day. It was as if the folk who lived in the house had turned neat and clean, all of a sudden. There was rarely anything to be found on the kitchen counters, or the bin, or the table. Mama-mouse’s growing appetite did not help matters much, either. But that day, it seemed that the stars were bright. Mama-mouse was ready to deliver her mice-lings any day, and this large scrap of meat would keep her well fed. For a while.
Papa-mouse took a large bite of the meat, chewing on it, savouring its juices, while he carried it to mama-mouse in her nest. As mama-mouse gobbled up the meat, papa-mouse felt a queasy rumbling in his stomach. Mama-mouse began to froth in the face, as she stiffened in a rictus of pain – her belly spasming.
“What did you give me!” she asked papa-mouse, as she started going into labour.
Papa-mouse did not answer. Everything was getting dark around him.
As papa-mouse and mama-mouse died that day, seven mice-lings were born from a dead mother. But these mice-lings were different. There was something in the scrap of meat that they had been forged from. They were seven, and one. Shifters of shape. Some parts of many. One part of none. One by one, the seven mice-lings crowded together, sniffing out each other with their yet-unseeing eyes. As they huddled, they melted into one, and blobbed into a human baby – barely a month old. The baby looked around at the carcasses of his dead parents and imagined vengeance.
I crawled on my hands and knees down the dark hall into the bedroom of the humans. I climbed up to the crib where their child lay sleeping fitfully. I fed, and then went to sleep there, waiting to grow up and remember.