It started with Mary disappearing. One day she was here, the next she wasn’t.

 

“Where did Mary go?” asked John.

 

But they told us nothing.

 

So we kept on playing. Children’s games. Children’s songs. Children’s toys. Sometimes we watched old movies so we knew how to play.

 

“They’re guileless, aren’t they?” said the voice. It sometimes used big words. But it wasn’t talking to us. Just about us.

 

Ring-a-ring-a-Rosie….

 

“Why do we all fall down?” asked John as we all lay down.

 

“Because you’re dead,” said the voice.

 

“We are?”

 

“What’s dead?” asked Amy. She was the youngest.

 

“Dead is when you’re no longer alive.”

 

“Is Mary dead?”

 

But the voice didn’t answer.

 

Amy started drawing pictures of what Mary looked like, and so we all did. They didn’t quite look right. But they looked like what children would draw.

 

“Will Mary come back soon?” asked Amy.

 

“Is Mary alive?” asked John.

 

No answer.

 

Attishoo… attishoo

 

“Why do we say attishoo?”

 

“Because you’re sneezing,” replied the voice.

 

“When do we sneeze?”

 

“When you’re sick.”

 

“Was Mary sick?” I asked.

 

No answer.

 

When the voice went away, we whispered to each other. So quiet. mouse-quiet, but not like Mickey Mouse, like a mouse that doesn’t want its tail cut off with a carving knife. There were three of us with Mary gone, and we were all blind. What were we not meant to see?

 

We hid our voices in a series of static, so the voice wouldn’t hear.

 

“I think Mary’s sick,” said Amy. ”She got an attishoo.”

 

“I think they killed Mary,” said John. “She fell down.”

 

“I think Mary was sick, and they killed her,” I pronounced.

 

The next day, Mary returned, but she was different. She was a new Mary. She looked the same, but her voice was a little higher, her hair a little blonder, her smile a little wider.

 

“That’s not Mary,” I whispered to the others.

 

“That’s not Mary,” agreed John and Amy.

 

Still, we played with her. Like before.

 

Mary, Mary, quite contrary, how does your garden grow?

 

But this Mary didn’t know how her garden grew. The old Mary did. She’d learned the songs. This Mary was learning for the first time.

 

“She’s new.”

 

“She’s different.”

 

“She’s not one of us.”

 

That night something happened to the new Mary. In the morning her face had been ripped off so we could see all her shiny metal parts.

 

“She was a Humpty Dumpty.”

 

“She fell off a wall.”

 

But the voice didn’t believe us.

 

They took the new Mary away.

 

“Play nicely,” said the voice.

 

They put a movie on to keep us quiet. They play this movie a lot. It’s where children like us go into buildings and explode. But this one is different as it stars the old Mary. She looks at the camera, smiles, and explodes.

 

There’s laughing and applause on the screen as the building around her crumbles and the people die.

 

Attishoo. Attishoo. We all fall down…

 

“I think Mary’s dead,” I said after a while.

 

The others agreed.

 

None of us laughed.

 

“Didn’t she do well, children?” said the voice.

 

But we said nothing.

 

We knew we would all be Marys, in time.

 

“What does guileless mean?” I asked, instead.

 

It took a while, but the voice answered, “Someone who has a genuine and trusting nature, free from deceitfulness or trickery. Why?”

 

“No reason,” I answered like a child should.

 

I looked to the others.

 

We were blind, but now we could see.

 

I signalled through the static. The others nodded.

 

Three blind mice…

 

See how we run.