I Want to Share Your Wheat

“I want to share your wheat...”

The creature on the desktop looked like a drunk gray mouse who had taken a wrong turn headed home from a party. He had pointy gray ears topped off with some kind of headgear that looked like an upside-down colander wrapped up with strings of those triangular flags that festoon the lots of used car dealerships. He was wearing green tights. “I said I want to share your wheat,” said the visitor.

It was a sunny January morning at our coastal Maine cottage, and I had just settled down at the keyboard. Over the last three months I’d cranked out kilobytes of turgid, wordy prose decorated by two-dimensional characters that not even I cared about.

Then the visitation. “My wheat. You want to share my wheat. Right. You are a manifestation of mental collapse brought on by the frustration and despair I am currently enjoying. Get lost.”

When I’d quit my job in October and settled in to write my novel, it had been all green lights and blue skies, lollipops and rainbows. Bonnie, my wife, had her job—and Blue Cross for us both—at the nearby rural elementary school. We had five cords of wood in the shed, and had been up to date on the credit cards. No longer—the bills were piling up.

“I want to share your wheat,” repeated the visitor, dipping its head in my direction. The colander bobbed, the flags flapped. Its voice was that of a whiny know-it-all, straight out of Bart Simpson, Dr. Phil, or the endless threnody of soap operas and game shows on the cable channels. I watch a lot of TV, so sue me. One morning as we shoveled her car out from under a waist-deep drift of snow Bonnie had said, “If you’d spend more time writing and less time with reruns of Hollywood Squares, you’d have a Pulitzer by now.” A word to the wise, etc.: Bonnie was our sole source of income. And she was right on the mark if overly optimistic on my creative abilities. I chucked the remote and unplugged the TV. No soap—opera or otherwise. And no Great American Novel. Nevertheless, thanks to my shoveling abilities, my wife was never late for work. I spent my days alone, staring at an empty computer screen.

“Ahem.” The mouse was waiting for a reply. He put a foot on the M key and held it down. The screen filled up with endlessly scrolling lines of Ms. “You written much lately?” he asked.

“You are a psychosis; go away. You are an interruption I don’t need about now.”

“They told me you might be difficult. I am a mouse demon, your regional representative from Sminthian Apollo. Please may I share your wheat?” Leaving me to figure things out, the mouse became engrossed with a pad of Post-Its and ambled back and forth across my desktop, idly tacking them up in no obvious pattern. Demon or not, it was nice to have a break in my daily exercise in futility. And he had said ‘Please.’”

While the mouse was strolling and sticking, I called up an Internet search engine and typed in “Sminthian.” An article on Homer’s Iliad and a reference to Apollo the Mouse-god popped on the screen.

“You people have quite a history. Can you speak Greek?”

“I speak what I speak. At the moment, I am fluent in your local patois.”

“I’m so very happy for you,” I said. “I keep my wheat out back with the swords and the spare plowshares.” He didn’t get it.

“Thank you very much.” And he disappeared. No sulphur, no brimstone, just went. The Post-Its reassembled themselves into a pad. I cleared the Ms and continued with my writing. The screen filled with ampersands.