This thread has a link to an imagining of If You Give a Mouse a Cookie if it were done by Ayn Rand.
Wikipedia gives the entire text for the original.
Those who’ve been around a while know that this board has or had some brilliant mimics.
So, what if If You Give a Mouse a Cookie were written by someone else?
Charles Dickens’s If You Give a Mouse a Cookie
The mouse had a cookie to begin with. Mind! I do not mean to say that I know the full source and provenance of the cookie, only that the mouse had it and there was no cookie seller standing by waiting to snatch it back from those tiny, grasping paws as if to say that the mouse had not paid its mite to have the cookie for its own.
So I will repeat, if you will allow it, that the mouse had the cookie and having it and having nibbled at it the mouse fell into a state of such thirst it turned about looking for someone, anyone, to provide a glass of milk and a straw with which to drink of it, the mouse being very careful of its whiskers and knowing that milk would clutch covetously to those whiskers which the mouse had been so very proud of through the years! For it is by whiskers mice are known hereabouts and by whiskers mice should be known evermore.
He came by a glass of milk. Again, I know nothing of the provenance but it was milk and cow’s milk at that in a tall, clear glass, twice the size of the mouse himself. And how the mouse could drink such a quantity of milk and stand by looking around as if to say that he would quite contentedly having another such glass of milk, his eyes so bright and crackling with a certain spirited fire that passersby would marvel if they saw it, but their eyes were cast down to watch their feet on the greasy cobbles, not looking around and peering through windows at a girl and a mouse and a boisterous fire.
The straw preserved the features and whiskers so well the mouse looked quite gentlemanly and clean and sleek! He turns then piping up in that shrill voice to ask for a mirror and a pair of neatening scissors and trims and adjusts that glory of whiskers.
“Oh! I am tired,” the mouse said suddenly.
“Oh, are you?” replied the girl.
“I am.” The fire spat and hissed a bit as the rain which had been lowering and growling earlier in the day kicked up a rumpus again. The girl started then nodded and picked up her candle.
She took him up a long, grey, creaking staircase and they climbed and climbed, the mouse sometimes climbing on his own small feet and sometimes resting on the girl’s shoulder ever upward lurching almost as if she were a slow ship in a high waving sea! Then the mouse settled into bed and plumped up the pillows and sneezed with the dust that had gathered along the velvet hangings and pulled out a little sketching pad and sketched.
The girl looked at the drawing in surprise. “Why that looks precisely like a glass of milk! But what is that next to it?”
“Oh!” said the mouse. “A cookie is always what’s wanting when there is a glass of milk. Never to have a cookie with a glass of milk! Who has heard of such a thing?”
Gertrude Stein’s If You Give a Mouse a Cookie
If you give a mouse a cookie. If you give a cookie.
He would like it the mouse would the mouse would like it would he like it.
If the mouse if I told him if I told him he would like it he would like it he would like it.
Eat.
Please eat.
Please eat now.
And now.
And the mouse says now there’s milk and the mouse says now and there’s milk the mouse says and now the milk says nothing the milk says and there is a mirror and the milk and the mouse and the mirror says the mouse says the milk says it looks like milk.
Rinse the glass.
Trim and brush.
Draw.
Drink.
Repeat.
Repeat exactly.
