This is a story about an egg. Not just any egg, but a free-range chicken egg (it said it right on the box). And free-range it was about to become. Early one weekday morning a man was making breakfast in his favourite dark blue dressing gown, unshaven and bleary eyed. The man intended to make his usual eggs on toast - however this wasn’t to be the case. In his sleep deprived state (he often worked late into the night) he missed the edge of the pan completely, leading to him dropping the egg. Now, I know what you’re thinking “the egg smashed, the end”, however this was not to be the case. For this egg possessed superior geometry and a great deal of luck, and was fortunate enough to simply roll down the man’s leg and into the space beneath the cupboard. Foolishly, the man went down to get it, only to get the sleeve of his robe caught in the pan, leading to it falling onto his head – hot oil and all. This required a trip to hospital and a few days off, much to his delight, but enough about him.

The egg remained, engulfed by darkness with just a speck of light coming from the distance. Surrounded by the remnants of meals long-since forgotten, unfathomable piles of dust and the spiders in every size imaginable. However, there is another creature down here, one almost as mysterious as the spiders themselves. Certainly feared and loved by many children, this was of course the mouse. But not any mouse, this was a jet-black mouse with long, spindly whiskers and an unusually pink nose. This mouse, in all its years, had never seen an egg from a distance, let alone been able to touch one. Hurriedly, the mouse pushed it into the hole.

This was no ordinary mouse-hole. In the 67 generations before this mouse, all had been busy building. Building what, you ask? A whole maze of tunnels, miniature railroads, food storage rooms, you name it, it was probably down there. As the egg rolled down the steep track into this mouse city, it could only wonder what it had gotten itself into. It gazed around(if such a thing is possible for an egg), and was confronted by all sorts of weird and wonderful lights and colours, ones he had never seen before. Before he could gather himself together(which is rather impossible, being an intact egg) he was whisked away into a lower room. Down here the darkest mice lived, and they had devised their own form of “voodoo”. Believing the egg was an offering from what they believed was god – which, in reality, was the man in the beginning of the story – they set about trying to crack its mysteries. Fortunately for the egg, it was impenetrable to everything the mice had at their disposal.

The weeks passed and the egg still remained, uncracked, still in pristine condition. The days were getting longer and longer, and he was contemplating his escape. But how? With no means of propelling himself up the ramp, the egg couldn’t simply go back up it to freedom. Then it hit him. He could simply rock backwards and forwards to fall off the pedestal he had been placed on, and with some more luck he could be back in the safety of the darkness under the bench. That wasn’t to be.

The luck ran out when he got off the pedestal and he rolled, unhindered, down deeper and deeper under the mouse-hole, left and right and up and down, following the railway system the mice had constructed. As he got further down, he heard the sound of running water. “Freedom!” he thought. The end of the track ran out and he fell through the darkness, smashing through spiderwebs and piles of dust as big as he, until...Splat. He smashed onto the exposed edge of a drainage pipe, never to be heard from again.

Until this day, the man has never found the egg.