Chronicles of Otis the Bunny: The Cape (Part 17)
Otis had never needed a costume to feel important. He had, however, never previously owned one, and the difference turned out to matter more than he expected.
Katie had tied the little red bandana around his neck for nothing more dramatic than a photo to send her sister, and Otis, who tolerated most dress up with the weary patience of a creature who understood photographs were simply one of the prices of being adorable, had discovered, the moment he hopped off for a lap of the garden, that the fabric caught the air behind him in a long, satisfying flutter that made every ordinary hop feel considerably more like an entrance, a discovery he spent the better part of the afternoon testing at increasing speeds until the running and the flapping and the sheer delight of it wore him thoroughly out.
He woke to an alarm, a real, wailing, faintly ridiculous siren sound coming from somewhere beneath his own hutch, and by the time he'd scrambled down into the space below it he found not straw and shadow but a gleaming secret headquarters, banks of screens showing every corner of the garden and a chair shaped, with unmistakable ceremony, exactly like a throne, and draped across its back, waiting for him, a cape considerably grander than any bandana Katie had ever tied.
The suit, once assembled, came with abilities Otis accepted the way he accepted most extraordinary things, as no less than his due: a thump that could be felt through solid ground for a hundred feet in any direction, ears sharp enough to catch a whisper on the far side of the fence, and a hop that carried him clean over the hydrangea in a single, cape snapping arc that would have embarrassed him thoroughly in daylight and thrilled him considerably now.
The alarm, when he finally silenced it, resolved into a live image on the largest screen: the vegetable patch, ransacked, tomatoes scattered and lettuce heads rolling loose across the dirt, and standing in the middle of the wreckage with an armload of stolen carrots, wearing a cape of his own fashioned from what appeared to be a stolen dish towel, the unmistakable, bushy tailed shape of his oldest rival, now apparently operating under the self appointed title The Squirrelinator.
"Ah," the Squirrelinator said, not remotely alarmed to see him, "the great Captain Clover. Come to lecture me about property lines again?" Otis dropped from the hutch roof in a full cape flourish he had absolutely practiced in his head at some point during the day, landed with a thump that rattled every fence post in the yard, and squared up against a villain he had, in one form or another, been squaring up against for a very long time.
What followed involved considerably more property damage than Otis had strictly intended, a thump that sent a wheelbarrow rolling clean across the yard, a hop that cleared the garden shed with room to spare, and a Squirrelinator considerably more agile than his dramatic cape suggested, ducking and weaving between raised beds with an armload of vegetables he showed absolutely no sign of relinquishing, right up until Otis finally cornered him against the compost bin and discovered, mid pounce, that the villain's secret lair, glimpsed through a gap in the fence boards, contained nothing more sinister than a modest, carefully organized pile of vegetables and a single, threadbare blanket nest built for one.
"It's just me over here," the Squirrelinator admitted, dropping the cape act along with the carrots, in a voice considerably smaller than his villain name suggested, "and winter's coming, and I wasn't sure anyone was going to leave enough for both of us this year," and Otis, cape still faintly smoking from the last dramatic hop, found the whole confrontation deflating into something considerably more familiar than a supervillain showdown, an old rival admitting, in his own roundabout way, to being nervous about having enough.
Captain Clover, it turned out, was fully capable of solving a crisis without a single additional thump, and the two of them spent the rest of the dream hauling an entirely reasonable, entirely negotiated share of vegetables back through the gap in the fence, the Squirrelinator's cape retired to a hook by his nest and Otis's own flourished rather less dramatically with every load, until the garden's live camera feed showed two rivals working the same patch side by side rather than one chasing the other through it.
He woke to the actual bandana still looped loosely around his neck, considerably less cape like in ordinary daylight, and Katie calling him in from the porch with the particular fondness she reserved for finding him fast asleep in an undignified sprawl, and Otis, trotting in at his usual unhurried pace, decided that a cape was a fine thing to flutter behind you on a good afternoon, but the real trick, apparently, had never been the costume at all.
Otis is a rabbit. If you keep one, our rabbit care guide covers housing, diet and safe ways to let a house rabbit play dress up.