The Ruler and the Tabletop

He'd named the ruler Manifold. The a-perfect length of 12 inches, softened the edge by centimeters. The rulers face showed the quarter marks in grayed chisel, an indention left by impress across the smooth fingerprints of time. The dirt sullied in a gully. The black mark of pen and scrape of charcoal long winded upon the surface, while the etched bars, red and black like a typewriter ribbon, segmented, girded, and delineated a precise vision of inches in ending and beginning. The downward angling face met the edge of the desk:

"My mornings are on top!" she said politely as light appeared beside the shadow of a paper riffling to the fan blade's blowing.
The ruler nodded acutely, "I Spent winters with Shelly where we didn't know what temperature it was "

"She's just about been on the side of each season. though. Tablet, smiled, "she showed herself off as being a bit more scrappy, slinder and lean when the dumpster food was to frozen to even cut at with an ice pick."
Shelly was a mouse with large ears, spectacles, a brown nose and a ranch style red housedress with lace ruffle running down the shoulders. She'd lived diligently through two summers and a winter, which was about as long as anyone could count.

"Twelve months" retorted Manifold, bowing out of discussion with the tabletop to address the fingerprints slowly rubbing their way into the mechanics of the story.

"I remember once," tablet interrupted, "that Shelly found a mite or some small beetle scurrying atop the jar. She tracked it down like a cat, slowly sniffing her way toward it, keeping it ever close to the jar's interpretive interface,"

"The bottom of the jar," followed Manifold,

"Yes, she moused the mite, you might say, into the transparent crevice in order to easily pinch it between her two sharp canines, which, if you’ll recall, hung slightly over the curve of her mouth."

"Those teeth were less apparent in the summer when her cheeks were puffy and warm with meat."
Manifold laughed and turned over revealing a ray of angles, a sunrise protracted across the rectangular surface. The afternoon shuttled to its conclusion. The short pause which spoke of relevant exhaustion spread thinly between loosely linked nouns and verbs: an exhale and an inhale, the former from the mouth, the latter from the nose. The alliterative adverb remained auspiciously invested, but not without sighing, "wine dark sea!" There skipped a record like a cliché, passing through someone else's sidelong glance to retrieve the frisbee.