Chronicles of Otis the Bunny: Otis Goes Downtown (Part 14)
Chronicles of Otis the Bunny: Otis Goes Downtown (Part 14)
Otis had never once doubted that he belonged in charge. He had simply never before been offered anything larger than a garden to prove it on.
Katie had come home from the Saturday market with paper bags that smelled of a hundred things Otis had never once encountered inside his own fence line, exhaust and asphalt and a dozen unfamiliar vegetables and, underneath it all, the particular, thrilling scent of a great many strangers having recently passed through one small space, and Otis had spent a solid twenty minutes with his nose buried in the folds of a grocery bag before Katie finally laughed and carried it out of reach, leaving him to curl up in a patch of sun with the last of that borrowed, foreign smell still clinging to his whiskers as he drifted off.
He woke to the rattle of a truck bed, crates of produce stacked around him in the dim, and by the time the doors swung open he understood, with the swift unbothered logic dreams offer free of charge, that he had stowed away somewhere considerably larger than his own garden and had absolutely no intention of being embarrassed about it. He hopped down onto pavement still warm from the day, looked up, and up, and up at buildings that made the tallest hedge in his own yard look like a modest suggestion, and felt not fear, which would have been the reasonable response, but the specific, expansive thrill of a creature realizing the world had been keeping something rather large from him.
The nearest fruit stand announced itself in a wall of citrus and melon, and Otis approached it the way he approached every new territory he had ever encountered, nose first, ears up, a slow proprietary circuit of the whole operation before he thumped once, hard, against the pavement in the specific tone he reserved for making his opinion known, and the vendor, an enormous and startled pigeon in an apron, looked down at him with an expression Otis chose to interpret as respect rather than confusion. "This," Otis informed the pigeon, with the calm certainty of a creature who had never lost an argument about territory in his life, "is now mine," and thumped again for emphasis.
Word, in the way of these things, traveled fast among the pigeons, and by the time Otis had moved on to declare his interest in a fountain two blocks over, a small, murmuring crowd of them had begun following at a respectful distance, cooing amongst themselves in a tone Otis found flattering without entirely understanding, and when he mounted the fountain's lip to survey his expanding territory, chest out, ears high, the pigeons below arranged themselves into something that looked, from where Otis stood, remarkably like a bow.
He accepted this development the way he accepted most compliments, as no less than his due, and spent the better part of an hour touring the rest of what he had rapidly begun thinking of as his new holdings, thumping his claim on a park bench, a newsstand, the shaded steps of a building with columns he found personally very flattering, his pigeon retinue growing with every block until he was leading what could only be described, by anyone watching from a window above, as a genuine parade, one determined rabbit at the front and a rolling, cooing crowd of subjects trailing behind him through streets that had never before hosted anything of the kind.
The plaza at the center of it all opened up wide and paved and busy with the kind of grand, unhurried fountain that seemed built specifically for someone to be crowned in front of, and Otis climbed its central step with the ceremony of a creature who understood, on some level, that this was very likely the largest kingdom he would ever be offered, pigeons arranging themselves in a wide, murmuring circle below, and for one full, satisfied minute he stood there and let himself feel every bit as large as the city around him.
It was in that same minute, oddly, that something else crept in alongside the satisfaction, a small, specific ache that had nothing to do with the size of the plaza and everything to do with the fact that not one stone of it smelled like his own dug-out corner by the hydrangea, and Otis, standing at the exact center of more territory than he had ever dreamed of owning, found himself thinking, with a clarity that rather spoiled the coronation, about one particular unfenced patch of clover that this entire glittering downtown did not contain a single blade of.
The pigeons, sensing perhaps that their king had gone quiet, parted respectfully to let him pass as he climbed down off the fountain's step, and Otis wound his way back through streets he had claimed only an hour before with considerably less ceremony this time, arriving at the same loading dock to find, with the specific convenience dreams reserve for exactly this situation, the same produce truck idling empty and open backed, as though it had known all along he'd be needing a ride home.
He woke on the sunny patch of grass with the last of the market smell finally faded from his fur, blinking up at his own ordinary, unglamorous, entirely correct fence line, and found Katie watching him from the porch with the fond, faintly amused expression of someone who suspected her rabbit had just had rather a big dream about rather a small garden. Otis thumped once, contentedly, against the dirt of his own claimed and familiar patch, and decided that a whole city might belong to him in theory, but this, precisely this, was the part of the kingdom actually worth having.
Otis is a house rabbit. If you keep one, our rabbit care guide covers the housing, diet and handling the real ones need.