Synkroniciti is delighted to welcome back writer Tim Collyer of Wiltshire, England with an intriguing tale, “Mouse Contemplating Mortality,” featuring Harold, a hungry rodent caught in an unanticipated existential quandary.
He’d studied this place, every creak, every careless crumb. His plan was perfect: slip past the Camembert, climb the pedestal, grab the Stilton. But tonight, something in the arrangement felt wrong—like waking from a good dream and finding it fading. The Red Leicester sat beside a new trap, shiny and sharp. Harold paused, memory of old stories echoing: “Dreams can kill you if you don’t wake up in time.”
Tim delivers this horror‑laced flash fiction with a deft blend of whimsical humor and profound dread, a combination sure to enrapture the surrealist. This is made all the more impressive by his ability to pack so much symbolism and meaning into less than 375 words, while creating a light and entertaining texture. Had he set out to speak about human longing and fulfillment directly, this would have been a much heavier piece. Inspired by Sandi Hill’s fascinating painting The Mousetrap, the story exemplifies ekphrasis at its best: extending beyond description to inhabit the painting’s tension and reimagine its possibilities. Tim ventures into unexpected territory—both for Harold and for us—probing the nature of appetite, perception, and reality itself.
Read “Mouse Contemplating Mortality” in Synkroniciti’s Expectations issue, Vol. 8, No. 2, available here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/.
Tim Collyer is a British short story writer and multiple Pushcart Prize nominee. His work won the International Flash 500 Prize and the Seán Ó Faoláin Short Story Competition, and has appeared in The Threepenny Review, Nebula, Clockhouse, Woodside Review, and Gently Mad Magazine, as well as the Bath Flash Fiction Anthology. His fiction has been recognised in over thirty international competitions and is known for its literary focus on memory, ethics, and the quiet pressures shaping ordinary lives. He lives in Wiltshire and writes literary and speculative fiction.