It
wasn’t the first rabbit she’d ever seen . . . or maybe it was. At least the
first rabbit in the wild. The first real rabbit trying so hard to disappear,
frozen there at the edge of the path, not a twitch showing in its body.
It
must have been the sound of her footsteps that warned the rabbit.
It wasn’t looking at her—or watching the path as far as she could tell. The
head faced away, the eye didn’t move, but, perhaps it still saw.
Minnie
froze too. I’ll become a rabbit. If
she mimicked the animal exactly, she’d learn what it felt like to be rabbit,
she’d absorb the essential rabbitness of the creature. A wave of unease swept
through her—shouldn’t she know the scientific name? or even the common name of
this particular rabbit?
No,
it didn’t matter. The rabbit didn’t have that information herself. Himself?
Itself? and still maintained its rabbitness. Should she know the gender before
she gave over to imitation? Did it matter? It wasn’t gender she was after, but
otherness, other creatureness. That’s what started the whole project: the slow
roam to see what one could see.
Jake’s
idea, but a good one. What he said he did all the time. She knew it would bring
her closer to him, and she’d begin to understand him better. She said she
wanted go into the woods with him, become one with an animal.
He
raised an eyebrow at that. “No, I go alone. Two people are too much energy for an animal.” Rejecting her.
So
she was there, alone, motionless, cold, fascinated, staring a rabbit
down, a rabbit that wouldn’t look at her. If she moved, it would go. That much
she knew. And if it moved, she would go. Reciprocity.
If
she didn’t move, she would never touch it, never get closer to it, never feel
the fur or the warm throb of the body. The longer she stood there, the more she
wanted to enfold the rabbit in her arms, to whisper in its silky ear, to love
it forever. But if she made that move, she’d lose it.
©
2012 Kathleen Coskran
Edgy metaphor, Kathy. Drew me in where I may linger for a while...
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