Tola and the Mimics
Her Story So Far…
When I was a little girl, I remember my grandmother muttering with shaking head over the sounds in the attic. Scuffles. Bumps. Scrapings. It wasn’t much, but just enough to make everyone offer an opinion. Rats? Poltergeists? It was only when my uncle winked at me and asked if I wanted to go on a little adventure that I learned there might be a third option.
“Now, don’t touch anything,” he said, kneeling so I could climb onto his back. The creak of the attic door revealed a shadowy cavern worthy of any adventurer’s quest. Scents of dry dust and musty mildew transported us to a world where monsters of old and broken miscellany seemed to move by the light of the lantern.
“You haven’t played up here, have you?” my uncle whispered to me. I shook my head, and he nodded. “I, on the other hand, played here many times as a boy.” He slowly moved the lantern. “I also grew up in this house, so I know what ought to be here.” He brought the light to rest upon a small box. “Such as rats. There’s not a single rat here. Do you know why?” I shook my head again.
From his pocket, my uncle brought a small bit of dried meat. He dropped it on the floor and slowly pushed it toward the box with his foot. I held my breath, waiting for him to startle me with a yell, then laugh at me for being gullible enough to believe—
The box sprang open with a slobbering hiss the moment the meat touched it. It rocked and rolled, the bait stuck to its side. At last, it managed to fling itself onto the meat itself, where it chomped through its leathery toughness with the snarling ferocity of a tiny animal. My curiosity was captured.
The mimics were deemed vermin, but my grandmother did allow that they kept the rats out of the house. And, besides, at least they were lesser mimics. Common-or-garden. Perhaps just pups. It was hard to say. What was said, however, was a direct prohibition to me. I was not allowed to go into the attic, lest I get bitten. Or worse.
But, my curiosity had been captured—stuck to the very idea of mimics as if I had become one of their prey. It wasn’t long before I had caught one. I kept it under my bed, feeding it and observing it as it tried out various forms. I filled an entire notebook with scribbled words and childish drawings, but I was careless one day, and it ate my notes, too.
I expected the leather and paper to make it sick, but there was no change to its morphing behaviors or scat (which, in its preferred box form, could be confused for sawdust). I pondered this for some time, until something my grandmother said made me realize that the leather and paper had once been alive. They had been beasts and trees, just as the dried meat had once been a cow.
Life itself, I decided, was the diet of a mimic.
My single mimic became two when I caught one in a friend’s basement, then three when I found one under the woodpile. I took meticulous care of them, which could not be said for many of my other possessions. I have been told that I am oblivious to much of my surroundings apart from mimics, so the inevitable day came when my threadbare dice bag caught on a nail and tore.
Dice spilled to the floor with the familiar crack and crackle of fate being decided. Many of them rolled under my bed, and as I flattened myself to retrieve them, a curious sight and sound met me. My mimics were devouring the dice with particular relish. They crunched and slurped and chittered, eating up my dice like bonbons. Needless to say, after that peculiar happenstance, many more dice became delectable morsels for the mimics while many pages of my notebook got eaten up by my notes and wonderings.
Life, I concluded, is more than what we are. It is more than bone and flesh, more than breathing or having once breathed. It is living. It is the chances, the choices, the attempts. It is the critical failures and the spectacular victories. It is the crack and crackle of fate being decided. And, to a mimic, there is nothing sweeter. Through the years, I have continued to hunt, collect, and study these fascinating creatures.
My curiosity is forever captured by them—some might even say I’m obsessed. But who couldn’t be? The more I learn about them, the more I learn about what constitutes life. Daily, I go out collecting in the underbrush of forests and in cluttered homes and musty caves. Nightly, I feed and observe my adorable specimens. They never cease to surprise me, and never more so than when that chance incident proved just how much we can learn from them about what makes up the richness of life.
Contributors to Lola’s Story