Bowlers of Emergent Barristers
Julio Froberg

There was a little man caught in a mousetrap; a sticky one, not a gruesome one -- the trap, not the man.
His legs protruded from one end, feet describing ten and two; it was an unlikely place for a siesta, he thought.
He wasn't wearing any shoes.
The man had been the undoing of many mice, but never one of his own kind; in fact, were it not for the victim being so small and irrelevant, the man thought he might have had qualms.
On hands and knees he searched along the walls and floorboards for a possible point of entry and found by the front door a set of little black loafers and spats; a miniature umbrella leaned against the wall and supported a rather rakish bowler hat.
On either side of the door were several other sets of equally tiny shoes, scattered like droppings.
Christ! We've a plague of tiny barristers, the man yelled.
The man tore up the stairs to tell his wife.
He opened the bedroom door to find his wife covered in tiny men, all nude save for the few who still wore their bowlers.
The man stood there staring at the colony; their emergent movements, as caught sidelong in the mirror, resembled the flow and ebb of a single, regular sized man wearing thirty-seven miniature hats.