As much as little Johnny Haig loved machinery and chemistry, he despised the zing-plater in the prison workshop,

as with a backlog of pants to plate, it was his pride at stake.

But as a small stoic man who never let his emotions sully his day, with little more than

a frown and a huff, he set about, fixing the fault.

The usual suspect was the woefully inadequate in electromagnetic bell, a laughably basic battery, easily a few decades beyond being obsolete,

consisting of a zinc electrode and a copper-lined bath of sulfuric acid.

Cracking open the ceramic case,

Jeanne cautiously waited for the caustic cloud of sulphur dioxide to settle,

for fear of being blistered, burned or blinded.

But reaching in to swap out the worn electrode, from the thick condensation on the ceramic

case's ceiling, fell a single drop of acid. As the tiny toxic drip burned his skin, smoking and searing,

as feeding off his limbs abundant liquid, the acid slowly ate away at his fingers' flesh.

Swiftly dunking his scorched digit into cold water, as the intense pain ceased, Johnny thought,

Thank heavens it was only a drop.

But what if it wasn't?

The mouse was already dead. Being small and skinny, its lifeless body lay within a whisker

of a field of juicy berries, but trapped

inside the prison's grey walls, it had starved to death, and Johnny sympathised.

Holding the cold little mouse by its limp tail, Johnny carefully placed it in a glass jar,

and as he dipped a ladle into the battery's ceramic case and filled the glass jar to the brim

with sulfuric acid, the dead mouse began to fizz, bubble, smoke and boil, until the transparent

fluid was nothing but a cloudy black broth. Johnny stirred it a bit, but felt no resistance.

...