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Write-off<\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Mice ate Steve\u2019s words. Shredding his manuscript into lettered litter they nested in hard-won phrases, and copulated in the ruins.<\/p>\n Lauren, sick of rustling and scampering, and cruel with sleep-deprivation, set traps in the attic.<\/p>\n In the morning, they climbed the loft ladder together. Eight furry bodies, fattened on his self-diagnosed-genius, lay limp in snapped traps, snarling a bloody-toothed snarl. Lauren dug a hole in the garden.<\/p>\n As the mice and the manuscript rotted, Steve\u2019s head filled with sentences. During the day they murmured in his ears; at night he tossed and muttered as they scrolled across the screen of his dreaming. Lauren receded; the sentences advanced.<\/p>\n Sick of his broken-backed sanity, and cruel with sleep-deprivation, Lauren let them win. He didn\u2019t notice her leaving. He was trying to capture the cold-war-whispering in a notebook, stabbing words into paper with a razor sharpened pencil.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u00a0Lesley Mace<\/strong> is the winner of the 2015 CWA, Margery Allingham Short Story prize. Published in Writers\u2019 Forum<\/em>, Bewildering Stories<\/em> and The Boston Literary Magazine<\/em>. She is an Escalator Award winner, and has received Arts Council funding for her writing.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Write-off Mice ate Steve\u2019s words. Shredding his manuscript into lettered litter they nested in hard-won phrases, and copulated in the ruins. Lauren, sick of rustling and scampering, and cruel with sleep-deprivation, set traps in the attic. In the morning, they climbed the loft ladder together. Eight furry bodies, fattened […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9223","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-prose-poetry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9223","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9223"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9223\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9225,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9223\/revisions\/9225"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9223"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9223"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9223"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}