Page 227 - Nuts to You - The Nutcracker Retold

The Mouse Queen felt as if she were swimming through a bowl of jelly. All her motions were slow and sluggish. Her eyesight was jiggling and joggling so much, she couldn’t see clearly. But this one thing she saw – the Nutcracker – whom she had cursed and brought into being. The one thing she saw was that nasty Nutcracker – raising Krakatuk to his massive, mighty jaws. And with one powerful crash of his teeth, he crushed the Nut – just as the Mouse Queen grabbed it. And then all the Mouse Queen saw was a wild, explosive light –and all she felt, was that she was exploding, too.
In fact, the Mouse Queen was zipping around like a giant mouse-balloon, jet-propelled and losing air, going in crazy circles – with everyone dodging and jumping, to avoid getting plastered by a quickly-deflating mouse.
The next thing the Mouse Queen knew, she was so close to the ground she could see the individual snowflakes that loomed up in front of her nose. Round and round and round she went in big circles, as she shrunk smaller and smaller, and went slower and slower, until the bag of hot air that had once been the Mouse Queen landed with a final “phhhhttttt!” of expelled air, and sank into the snow.
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