Mouse talked to me yesterday. I didn’t ask him too, he just did.
I was tracing the message on the wall with my finger when I heard a sigh behind me. I spun around to see Mouse. Without looking at me, he leant forward and traced the message with his own tattooed finger. I don’t think he even registered I was there. His finger paused on the word ‘free’ and he bowed his head, his faced screwed up with emotion.
“Mouse…” I whispered it, my voice smaller than I expected. He jumped and looked at me with this sad, sad look in his eyes. Then he sighed again and pulled out a battered old Nokia phone that looked about a million years old. He pressed a few buttons before swinging it around so I could see the screen. On it was a picture of a girl, about my age, maybe older. She had dark hair pulled back in a rough ponytail and her mud-brown eyes stare out at me from under her fringe. She is holding an orange tabby cat who looks up at her, pleading for another pat. She is sitting on this bed, the bed I’m sitting on right now. She looks like she has just been disturbed from thought.
“Her name was Saoirse.” His voice was quieter than mine and I have to lean forward to hear. “It means freedom.” A small smile appears on his lips but it disappears as quickly as it came. “She never made it past the gate.”
“Oh.” I said as the hope I'd been clinging to all these days fell out of my mouth, tumbling and tumbling, before shattering into a million pieces over the floor.