Chronicles of Otis the Bunny: The Guest in the House (Part 6)
Chronicles of Otis the Bunny: The Guest in the House (Part 6)
Otis had weathered thunderstorms, a raccoon of dubious intentions, and one entire afternoon of a neighbor's leaf blower without so much as a flattened ear, but nothing in his three years of accumulated composure had prepared him for the sound a guinea pig makes when it wants a pepper and hasn't gotten one yet.
The guinea pig's name was Walter, and he belonged to a friend of Mike's who was flying somewhere for five days and had asked, with the particular confidence of someone who had never actually watched a rabbit's face during a territorial dispute, whether Mike would mind keeping him for the week. Mike had said sure, of course, no trouble at all, and had then carried Walter's travel cage directly into the sunniest corner of the living room, which was to say directly into the eleven square feet Otis had spent the better part of a year establishing as unambiguously his own, the corner with the good afternoon light and the rug he had shaped to his exact specifications through months of deliberate flopping. Otis watched the cage go down from the doorway with the stillness of a landholder watching a survey crew arrive unannounced, and he filed the moment away in the part of his mind reserved for Grievances Requiring Further Study, a section of his memory that was, by this point in his life, considerably larger and better organized than the part reserved for anything else.
Walter, it turned out, narrated. He announced the pepper before it arrived and celebrated it after, he greeted the mail carrier's footsteps two houses down with a full-throated appeal, he seemed to regard silence itself as a kind of emergency to be corrected at volume, and he did all of this while popcorning three inches straight into the air with an enthusiasm Otis found frankly undignified in a creature with such short legs. Otis, a rabbit who had built his entire reputation on the strategic deployment of stillness, on the idea that a creature of his standing did not need to announce his opinions because his opinions were simply understood to be correct, found himself sharing airspace with an animal who announced everything, constantly, in a register that made the window glass hum. He thought, once or twice, of the wild cottontail who kept a respectful three feet of distance at the fence line and never said a word about anything, and found the comparison did Walter no favors whatsoever. For the first two days Otis responded the only way he knew how, by relocating his lounging spot six inches closer to the cage each hour in a campaign of slow, wordless annexation he was fairly certain Walter hadn't even noticed, which was itself insulting in a new and specific way.
It was the lettuce that changed things, in the end, the way these matters are so often decided by vegetables rather than diplomacy. Mike had brought in two pieces of romaine, one for each of them, and set them down at what he clearly imagined was a safe and equitable distance apart, and Walter had immediately abandoned his own piece to wheek directly at Otis's, not out of hunger exactly but out of what Otis eventually understood, watching him do it a second and third time, was simple nervousness dressed up as opinion, the noise of an animal who felt safer commenting on everything than commenting on nothing. Otis considered defending his romaine on principle. Instead he nosed it an inch toward the cage, an offering rather than a surrender, and Walter went quiet, for the first time in four days, to eat it, and something in the corner settled that no amount of territorial repositioning had managed to settle on its own.
By the week's end they had arrived at an arrangement neither of them would have called friendship but which functioned, in practice, like a very small treaty, Otis keeping to his half of the rug and Walter keeping his opinions to a volume Otis had, against all expectation, stopped minding. Mike found them there on the last evening, the cage door open for supervised visiting hours, Walter narrating something about a carrot top and Otis lying close enough to the wire to suggest he was listening, and said, without looking up from his coffee, "Guess you found a use for him after all." Otis did not dignify it with so much as an ear twitch, but he noted, in the part of his mind reserved for houseguests he had not asked for, that the eleven square feet felt roomier for having been shared, and he wondered, with the particular unease of a landholder revising his own maps, what else might turn up expecting a corner of his kingdom before this was over.