The Medical Records of Lament W.W. Rawrat

“Lament W.W. Rawrat, it is alleged that you did attempt to inject your classmate in the neck using a syringe filled with mouse blood. How do you answer this very serious charge?”

With a glowering eye, the accused sighted down the length of his slender arm and then unfolded his waxen index finger slowly and deliberately, until it pointed menacingly at the plaintiff like a bayonet at the end of a rifle.

“That boy,” he began, intoning each syllable with a precise amount of force that gave the impression he was restraining some wild animal, “inhales air and exhales lies.”

The boy, noted for his large imposing stature and a penchant for picking fights, dropped his head and stared at the floor. The teacher called for witnesses to come forward and deliver testimony, but there was only silence in the classroom, silence and the sound outside of the wind clanging a pulley against the flagpole.

“Very well,” she said, casting a contemptuous glare at her class.

“Lament W.W. Rawrat, although I am not convinced of your innocence, I have no choice but to dismiss this case. I admonish you however, Master Rawrat, that performing medical experiments on your classmates will never be tolerated at the Academy, and that, despite the dismissal of these charges, this incident will still be entered into your permanent record.”

And so, another sheaf of stapled pages was placed in the already bulging folder of young Lament W.W..

Thumbing back through this documentation, one could observe in reverse an ever-increasing fixation on murine-themed science experiments, growing in scope and sophistication at every chapter.

But where was the explanation for it all? Where was the missing slip of paper detailing an incident of sufficient trauma to put the whole program into motion?

For without this delinquent paperwork, how was one to account for the boy’s successful demonstration of a method for transfusing the blood of one live mouse into another, as they lay strapped to miniature gurneys? And how to explain his insistence on filing a patent for the technique, persistently completing the lengthy application while the other boys played ball and wrestled at recess?

And despite the dubious utility of such a process, what was one going to make of his daily scramble down the driveway to meet the letter carrier, only to be disappointed when, once again, there was no reply from the Patent Office of the United States?

A complete reconciliation of the behavior of Lament W.W. Rawrat could only be given by his parents, Aspern and Ovula, for they possessed and retained in the secure privacy of a safe hidden behind a painting, the documents that described the supernumerary gland which accompanied the child into this world.

So mysterious was this organ that its effects confounded the entire Fellowship of the College of Endocrinologists, who continually made pilgrimages to see the infant Lament, often traveling thousands of miles for the opportunity. Even so, never did any one of them discern the functional nature of the unctuous exudate that was burped periodically into the bloodstream of the young boy.

The most they could agree on was that this was the chief molten constituent of the young boy, and that what they were seeing was the process by which he was being poured into the mould of his future self, so that one day he would harden into his finished form.