The Hare
BY ELINOR ABBOTT
The Hare appeared the afternoon Tonya texted about Brett Weschler’s latest DUI. I read that text and realized I had become a trough, filled and emptied with a daily slush of information about everyone around me, who I honestly couldn’t care less about. I wondered what I did care about. I sat with my feet in the pool for a long time, trying not to look at my phone. It was impossible. I guess this is what happens when your brain is dead, I thought. I guess this is how drug addicts feel. I was sad for my whole boring, addled life, stretching in front of me like a big hot tarmac runway, baking in the climate change sun.
I went for a walk and that’s when I saw Him. It was out past Aunt Cheska’s estate, where the hothouse was before the fire. The Hare was at the edge of the forest just beyond. He was auburn like the head of a beautiful woman, and huge. I imagined holding him in my arms and was filled with the image of his long dark claws tearing into my throat like a fork through lox. There was a violence to Him I found very appealing. Sun shone through his ears like stained glass, so silken, a complex map of precious veins. In that moment, those ears seemed to me like the world’s number one must have accessory. Who were any of us, really, without long soft ears, pulsing with our own vitality? His eyes were urgent, alive, the color of autumn. He looked right at me, saw me plainly, just as I was and had always been: another animal. I tried to remember the last time I had been aware of this bald and primal fact. I was humbled before it. There was a change in the sunlight; I squinted and He was gone. I sunk to my knees in the tall grass and stayed there until twilight.
“You’ve ruined the knees in those socks,” Mother said when I got home. “Make sure you tell Maja to treat them before they go in the wash.”
“I saw a huge red rabbit,” I told her, breathless. I flopped down into a chair. Mother and Crispin stared at me and I reached up and pulled a puff of fountain grass from my hair.
“Rodents carry disease,” Mother pursed her lips.
“Not this one,” I said with certainty.
“It was probably a hare,” called Nial from the other room. I could just hear him above the roar of the television.
“What?” I cried back.
“A hare! Big rabbits are hares. And they’re not rodents, they’re lagomorphs!”
“Well,” I said, brushing my skirt off, “this one was beautiful, whatever he was.”
Crispin put his fingers up by his temples in crude approximation of bunny ears and bared his front teeth. “Rabbit fucker,” he said to me through one of his inane giggles.
I threw him a disgusted glance and stood. “If anyone wants me, I’ll be in the conservatory.”
In response Crispin put his hand in front of the lamp light and made the shadow of a rabbit on the wall.
I dragged Aunt Cheska’s big book of flora and fauna into the conservatory and flipped through it until I found an image of a hare. Plain brown, but close enough. I pretended to sneeze and ripped out the page. I took it to my room and tacked it to my headboard. I fell asleep without dinner and not having texted Tonya in many hours. There was a big thunderstorm that night, and as I slept The Hare returned to me. In my dream I got up to shut the window and when I looked down into the lawn The Hare was there, looking up at me. He stretched his neck out, so that it was many feet long, and as it stretched his head grew until it was as big as the window. He pressed his eye to the glass and looked in at me.
I woke up flushed. I knew then, He had seen me. Blessed me. I got up and packed my rolling suitcase. Dragging it through the kitchen, I announced to Maja and Nial that I was moving into the fallout shelter.
“Shall I bring your meals to you there?” Maja asked.
“Please,” I said, grabbing a slice of buttered toast off the counter as I walked by, cramming it into my mouth. I walked out to the depressed door in the far corner of the garden and entered the code into the keypad. Inside, it was cool and dim. There was a TV, a gaming system, a big cooler. I didn’t need any of that. I took the sheets and pillows off the bed and constructed a little nest on the floor. I didn’t think hares slept in nests, exactly, but I knew they didn’t sleep on big down mattresses. I connected my laptop to the printer and filled the room with pictures of hares.
A few days must’ve gone by when someone let Tonya into the fallout shelter. “You didn’t return any of my texts about Brett’s DUI,” she said by way of announcing herself. “We all started to think you were dead or like kidnapped or something.” Her voice died away as she walked further into the shelter. I watched her face as she looked around the room, my nest, the pictures on the wall, her eyes finally settling on the little hare skeleton I’d purchased off the internet, surrounded by lit candles.
“This is some weird shit, Natalie,” she said. I frowned, wishing she’d go away.
“I’m into hares now,” I said. I was trying to bring Him back into my dreams, so he’d look at me again. So far nothing worked.
“I can see that,” she said. I went back to the paint I was mixing, swirls of vibrant red and brown.
“Y’know…,” she drawled out irritatingly until I turned to look at her. “If you’re like down here because you, like, want to be in a warren or whatever, hares don’t sleep like that.”
“What?” I said.
“That’s rabbits,” Tonya said. “Hare’s sleep just like on the ground.” At my expression of horror, she continued. “There’s hares sometimes at our cabin. My dad pointed out some sleeping ones once.” I burst into tears.
Tonya took me up into the sunlight of the lawn. We sat together on the bench swing. “I doubt your family are going to be okay with you sleeping on the lawn and stuff though because, like, what if someone saw you.” I nodded and wiped my nose on the edge of my pajama top. “So maybe the fallout shelter is best for now.” She asked what I was doing, exactly. I told her about The Hare, about coaxing him back to visiting me in a dream again, instructing me how best to serve Him.
Tonya nodded and picked at her nail polish. “Maybe I could help you.”
“Really?” I was surprised.
“I’m so bored,” she said.
We decided that instead of trying to be like The Hare, I should demonstrate my willingness to hold Him in reverence. Like they do in old timey religions. I started sleeping on the mattress again. The floor nest now seemed passé. I asked Tonya if she thought it was bad that she had never actually seen Him and she said no, it was evidence that my exaltation of Him was powerful enough to bring on board disciples.
We wrote poetry for Him and read it first under the moon, then under the noon sun; we tried putting it to music. We uploaded some of it to YouTube, but after only getting 11 hits, took it back down. We raised the fallout shelter’s hare paraphernalia to levels slightly above our own heads, to show we were beneath Him. We fasted. We went out to the old hothouse and put a chain of daisies and a pile of stones at the spot where I first saw him. We cut our hands and dripped blood over the stones. We got high and painted crude hares on our naked bodies and danced around aimlessly to the idea of Him. But nothing helped.
“Well,” Tonya said finally, “I think maybe we should try killing something.”
I was lying on the bed in the fallout shelter, despondent with the loss of Him, the memory of his eye an unbearable sorrow.
“But why?” I said.
“I think in religion they sometimes make sacrifices?” She didn’t sound too sure.
“I think,” I said, “they also too like beat themselves with whips and stuff.”
Tonya pulled a sweatshirt down over her head. “I’m not super up for that,” she said.
“Me neither,” I sighed.
She extended her hand to help me up. “Let’s try killing something.”
I rose and put on my boots. “Where are we going to find something to kill?”
“The forest? There’s lots of stuff in the forest. There’s gotta be, right?”
We took some guns from the fallout shelter and headed into the forest. It was nighttime and we didn’t bring anything for light. There was moonlight, but we still kept getting hit in the face by branches and tripping over rocks. But we were determined. We kept walking, for maybe an hour or two. When we stopped, exhausted, we could hear a river. The forest around us was too quiet. I had no idea where we were anymore in relation to my house or to normal society.
“I feel like,” Tonya said, “something is maybe going to make a sacrifice out of us.”
All the hair on my body stood on end. I felt sure we were being watched.
“Ton,” I said slowly. Her face had gone white.
“There’s something behind you,” she said, raising her gun. I was too afraid to turn. “Jesus Christ,” said Tonya and fired. The bullet seared into my right shoulder like a revelation. I staggered then dropped to the forest floor. “Oh God, Oh God, Oh God,” said Tonya, rushing to me.
“Natalie, He’s here,” she said.
But I was blind. I could see nothing.
“He’s here for you.”
She was almost screaming, but not in fear exactly, more elation.
“How do you know?” I gasped, my blind eyes searching, my shoulder bleeding and bleeding.
Tonya took my quaking hand and pulled it up to my face, first one side then the other. And there, I could feel them, long and lovely, my sleek and sacred ears.
