Dear all mouses,

I caution you to stay at home, for men are much like lions in Ohio. Men like sleeping cats in grass.

From Ohio, one in New York might clarify, lick great paw and tell of leaving such a place—not on a hunt—although prey happens—but on a quest for quarries dried of water.

Dearest mouses, know this: In this world we have the offered and the asked for.

Lions, those from Cleveland, tend to send grant applications for the stone to come to them. Half-faced by grass, this one I’ll use as an example pants and wonders why the wait. He’s planned for nothing but to get the quarry, place his body on the highest rock, reach a certain height then fall to sleeping in the latter-day sunlight. In his broadened nose, his growl-full yawn, one could find a way to want this lion who wants this quarry—a mouse who skitters by his feet as he goes walk walk walk away, on deadened grass—as he gives in, and goes in search for stone on which to lie.

There is the offered, dearest mouses. There is the searched for.

A stone on which to say he’s made it somewhere.

Our mouses hearts beat two bazillion every time we skit away from stomping paws. But oh, we mouses think. But oh, the lion’s paw.

—Yours in solidarity, K