Chronicles of Otis the Bunny: The Moon Made of Clover (Part 10)
Chronicles of Otis the Bunny: The Moon Made of Clover (Part 10)
He had always suspected the moon owed him something, and it turned out to be clover.
Otis had eaten his fill of romaine that evening, more than a creature of his standing strictly required, and had curled into the corner of his hutch with the particular heaviness that follows a good dinner and a long afternoon of supervising the garden, and it was in this state, three parts drowsy and one part smug, that the leash simply stopped being a leash at all. He noted, in the part of his mind reserved for phenomena too strange to file anywhere else, that it had not snapped or been unclipped so much as unraveled into a long thread of silver light that led up past the hydrangea, past the fence he had spent two years treating as more of a suggestion than a boundary, and straight into a sky gone the deep blue black of a pupil opened all the way. He did not question it. A rabbit who questioned every rope of moonlight offered to him would never get anywhere, and Otis fully intended to get somewhere.
By the time he arrived, and he could not have said whether the trip took four seconds or four hundred years, the moon turned out to be nothing like the flat gray coin advertised from the garden. It was clover. Not clover scattered across moon rock the way weeds come up between paving stones, but clover as the entire material of the place, acres of it rolling into more acres of it, three leafed and occasionally, gloriously, four, with no fence post, no chicken wire, and no property line of any kind in sight to suggest that any of it belonged to anyone but him. He ate a mouthful the size of his own head before he had taken ten steps, and found it to be the best clover he had ever tasted in his life, sweeter even than the famous three feet of fence line he guarded so faithfully back home, and he understood at once, with an enormous and immediate satisfaction, that he had in some sense been promoted.
He was still chewing when he noticed he was not alone. Other rabbits sat scattered across the silver green fields at distances that seemed, on reflection, very precisely measured, and these were not garden rabbits or farmyard hens wearing rabbit shapes but something older, gray muzzled and long past any need to prove themselves, regarding him with the calm of creatures who had been eating clover on the moon for longer than Otis's whole family line had existed. One of them, easily twice his size and carrying himself with the unhurried authority of a magistrate, informed Otis without much ceremony that a rabbit did not simply wander onto lunar clover and start eating from whatever patch he liked, that there were boundaries here too, older and subtler than fences, marked by nothing Otis could see but understood by every rabbit who had ever lived here, and that a newcomer would do well to watch where his elders grazed before he chose a spot of his own. Otis filed this away in the part of his mind reserved for rules he fully intended to respect right up until he found a sufficiently good reason not to, and set about learning the local customs as fast as a rabbit of his ambition could manage, which turned out to be quite fast indeed.
He learned, over what felt like several very long and buttery afternoons, that the oldest doe held the crater at the center by a custom nobody could quite explain and everybody nonetheless obeyed, that no rabbit ate from a neighbor's ring of clover without an invitation delivered in a look rather than a word, and that the moon itself turned slowly enough that a sufficiently patient rabbit could, in principle, eat his way clean around it given enough centuries and a reasonable metabolism. He found, to his private delight, that his instincts for territory, the lettuce bed, the shade under the hydrangea, the three feet of fence line, matters he had always treated with the gravity due a landholder, served him rather well up here, as though he had been training for lunar citizenship his whole life without once suspecting it. By the time the old doe finally nodded at him across the crater, a gesture he understood immediately to be the nearest thing to a knighthood a rabbit could receive, he had already begun composing the version of the story he would tell if anyone back home thought to ask.
Nobody did ask, because he woke instead to the ordinary gray light of the hutch and the ordinary green smell of yesterday's lettuce going soft in the corner, and it took him a long, blinking moment to understand that the leash on its hook by the door had never gone anywhere, and that the fence, when he considered it, was still very much a fence. Katie found him a few minutes later sitting unusually still for a rabbit who was normally first at the door, and crouched down to scratch behind one ear, saying, "You look like you've been somewhere important." Otis thought this was closer to the truth than Katie could possibly have intended, and ate his breakfast lettuce that morning without much enthusiasm, comparing it, unfavorably and a little wistfully, to a memory already softening at the edges the way dreams do, and looked out at the ordinary fence and the ordinary three feet of clover beyond it with the distinct sense that he now knew something about the shape of the world, and what might lie past its edges, that he had not known the day before.