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The Mouse Who Saves the World
by Luisa Penrose (pseudonym) · 18 pages
A chubby, grain-fed field mouse goes to the city. Skinny from hunger, she saves the world from a nuclear disaster.
Ages 9+
The story
A country mouse, living in a farm's silo, visits the city to earn a name. Hunger drives her to chew anything worth nibbling.
She mouse-sneaks into a military building and has nowhere to hide. A massive, fiber-optic computer gives her a chance to survive.
She gets skinny to squeeze through the cables and starts to dream of stars twinkling in the darkness.
Read a sample
The opening chapter, in full, without leaving the page.
The Mouse Who Saves the World
Chapter One — The Last Grain
The field was smaller than it had been the year before, and the year before it had been smaller still, which was the sort of thing you noticed when your whole life was measured in grains.
Pip sat on top of the last full ear and counted what was left. He counted twice, because the first count was the kind of number you hope you got wrong.
The barn owl found him there at dusk. She came in low and slow, the way she came for things she did not intend to eat, and she laid one feathered wing against the stubble like a curtain being drawn.
"There is a seed," she said, "kept in a box, under a stone house, at the end of the long road where the water tastes of iron. It is the kind of seed that remembers how to make a field. Will you go and fetch it?" Pip, who had never fetched anything, said yes before he understood the question.
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