Following Rabbits
“Careful!” cried the rabbit.
“Oh dear,” said the hatter.
“What is it?”
“I tripped over the pitchfork,” John said.
“He’s not dead!” said the rabbit.
John put his face in his hands. “Oh dear. He’s gone, isn’t he?”
The rabbit hopped up next to John’s face and said, “I’m afraid he is. But he’ll be back. He’ll be back with his friends this time. You should have made sure he was dead. I believe there’s a moral here!”
“So true,” said the hatter. His head was spinning. He felt dizzy. His entire body was tingling.
“We’ve got to get you out of here. Once they get here, they’ll kill you for what you’ve done.”
“I deserve to be killed,” said John. “I deserve it for what I’ve done.”
“You deserve no such thing,” said the rabbit.
“I’ve killed my family,” John said.
“And you’ve been killing yourself for them for years. Now it’s even.”
John didn’t reply to this.
In the distance a dog barked.
“That’s them,” the rabbit said. “You have to come with me. I can take you somewhere safe.”
“Where can we go?”
The dogs continued to bark. John didn’t know if Brom, who had four puncture holes in his back from a pitchfork had enough time to get to town to get a posse together, but time was acting very strange lately. John supposed that if time could stop for him it could also go for him, and if it could go slow, it could also go fast.
“Follow me,” said the rabbit and the rabbit hopped into the trees.
John climbed to his feet. He adjusted the hat on his head, and bounded into the forest after the rabbit.
They ran and ran. Slivers of silver light filtered through the tree limbs just enough for John to keep an eye on the rabbit in front of him. The rabbit bound through trees and briars and fallen logs and dead leaves. John followed behind him, one hand on his hat to keep it from falling off, the limbs reaching out and slapping his face as he ran.
As they ran, the sounds of the dogs grew louder, and amongst the barks, he thought he could hear the sounds of men talking, shouting. It was a whole mob. He wondered if they had already found the bodies of his family. He wondered if they could hear him and the rabbit bounding through the woods.
They ran. The rabbit hopped up over a stump, and John hurdled it. The rabbit zigged to dodge a thorny bush and John zagged to avoid it as well. The rabbit bounded along quietly, occasionally urging John along with cries of, “Come along, John,” or “A little further, a little further.” John thundered through the forest, his feet smashing sticks and kicking up leaves, his breath coming in and out of his chest in screams.
Above all of this were the approaching dogs. The approaching men. The hunters. With their guns and their knives and their ropes and their pitchforks.
John’s chest was in agony. He could imagine his taxed heart beating away, trying desperately to pump the needed blood. “A little further!” cried the rabbit, but John didn’t think his body could go even a little further. His entire body was falling apart; it had been falling apart for sometime. The oozing sores, the aching joints, the bleeding gums. He wasn’t in any condition to outrun a mob. It was just too much.
“A little further!” the rabbit said. He bounced up and over a log.
“I cahh—” John lifted his leg to go over the log, but his toe caught. He was falling.
Behind him, the dogs and men were right on top of him.
He fell and smashed into the hard, cold forest floor. The air went out of his lungs in a whoof. He tasted dirt. And he saw the little gray feet of the rabbit going away, and then everything went to black.
~*~
When he opened his eyes, the rabbit was nuzzling his face.
“Wake up,” the rabbit said. “Wake up, we’re here.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Don’t be sorry. Be yourself,” said the rabbit and bounced away from the hatter.
John sat up. There were no dogs in the background. No men. Only the soft sounds of birds in the trees. A pale light was coming from somewhere. Perhaps it was sunrise. Or sunset. It was hard to tell when your watch was broken.
The hatter wiped his eyes. There, amongst the trees, was a long table, longer than any he had seen before. And guess what, it was set for tea!
The rabbit jumped up into a chair sitting at the table. “We’ve got a seat for you right here,” the rabbit said.
“You do?” the hatter exclaimed happily.
“We sure do,” said the rabbit.
And the hatter stood up from the dirt, adjusted his hat, and took his seat at the table for tea. “Do you like riddles?” he asked the rabbit reaching out for his first cup of tea. “I love riddles, do you like riddles?”
Gregg Winkler splits his time editing On the Brighter Side, an online multi-genre humor ‘zine, and writing original fiction. Gregg has been writing for several years, having published dozens of nonfiction articles and short stories in such places as Graveside Tales Press anthologies, The Shantytown Anomaly, Necrotic Tissue, Sigma Tau Delta’s literary journal, The Prism, and Experience Oklahoma.
very very good