" Once, several years ago, I was looking around for something and moved a piece of furniture only to behold behind it a fuzzy little ball of...what? I looked closer, which is always a bad idea, adn jumped back with a screech. Of course, it was a dead mouse. A dead mouse that had been there long enough that it looked a little--what?--petrified.

So I did what any normal person would do in a similar circumstance. I immediately, that very minute, sat down and wrote a story about it. I wrote and wrote until I was pleased with the dead mouse story. And then I used a piece of cardboard to life and slide the little mouse corpse into a small white box--the kind you use for jewelry. After all, I reasoned, I had just written a story about him! It felt like something worse than abandonment to get rid of him now...we were linked! Connected through the sacred ritual of storytelling. And anyway, what if this story ended up, you know, famous? What if my dead mouse story ended up being my "The Lottery"? Wouldn't it be incredibly neat to still have the original thing that inspired it?

Yes, this is the way I think.

So you can see the situation is bad. I have at least one dead rodent that I have kept ON PURPOSE. "

― Eve O. Schaub , Year of No Clutter