shuffling on the mortal coil

I dreamed of a small, purplish-blue extra-fuzzy mouse with an abnormally long tail.

It was scampering around while a group of friends and I watched, giggling. For some reason, I think we were in the parish hall or the basement of the church I grew up attending. The mouse-like thing ran over and around our legs as we sat in a circle on the ground and watched, our legs stretched out in front of us. We were all wearing shorts. The mouse's feet tickled our bare skin.

In the other room, some kind of surgery was being performed on the minister's teenage son (note, not the real minister...not his real son) in the hopes that doing so would guarantee his place in the hereafter. He was awake. Later, my friends and I walked in to see him reclining on a beanbag chair with ice packs piled around him. He was laughing. The surgery was a success.

Back to the blue mouse. As it ran over my ankle, it opened its suddenly lizard-like mouth. Its jaws were hinged, and its mouth impossibly wide. It closed its jaws, clamping them over the inside of my ankle, just above the bone. It held on and wouldn't let go.

The mouse was gone and I was in my car...my second car...the black Corolla...trying to get out of the church parking lot. There was a brown bruise on my ankle where the mouse had been. As I drove, I looked down again and again at the spot on my ankle, sure I would have to go to the hospital and have it looked at but reluctant to do so. Once, when I looked down, I saw a bug burrowing into the flesh at the center of the bruise. I plucked it out...the husk of a beetle's exoskeleton falling to the floor of the car.

When my alarm went off this morning, I was really glad.

"I dreamed a funny blue mouse bit me because I was laughing at it," I told my hubby.

"There's a children's book here," he mumbled, half asleep. "That's a good moral...don't make fun of people because they're smaller than you...or blue. You should write that."

If I do...I'm leaving out the part about the bug.