Chronicles of Otis the Bunny: The Costume (Part 9)
Chronicles of Otis the Bunny: The Costume (Part 9)
Otis had composed, by his own careful count, four separate speeches of protest before the crown ever touched his head, and delivered exactly none of them.
Katie produced it on a Saturday morning without any of the ceremony the object clearly deserved, a small ring of white felt petals stitched around a loop of green elastic, the sort of thing usually reserved for toddlers at a garden party, and announced over breakfast that the neighborhood was holding its spring fair that afternoon, with a table set aside for photographs of the local pets, and that Otis, whether he liked it or not, was going to be on it. Otis liked it not at all, or rather he began immediately drafting the position that he liked it not at all, cataloguing in real time the specific dimensions of the insult being proposed to a rabbit who had, over the course of one unremarkable spring, claimed the lettuce bed outright, annexed the shade beneath the hydrangea, and held the best three feet of clover along the fence line against all comers, including a cottontail who knew better than to test him. A creature of that standing, he reasoned, did not wear things. A creature of that standing was, if anything, owed a hat by other people, as tribute. He filed the entire proposal, unheard protests included, into the part of his mind reserved for Grave Miscarriages of Justice, a file that already held the leash, the carrier, and one deeply unnecessary bath.
The fitting itself went smoother than his internal opposition would have predicted, which was its own small betrayal. Katie looped the elastic under his chin with two careful fingers and settled the petals just behind his ears, and Otis, mid sentence in a protest he had not yet spoken aloud, found himself holding perfectly still and tilting his head very slightly toward the kitchen window, where the morning light happened to be doing something flattering to white felt. He told himself this was strategic, that a rabbit who did not move made the indignity end faster, and he told himself this again a moment later when he adjusted the tilt half an inch further for no reason he was prepared to examine, in a manner that had nothing whatsoever to do with cooperation and everything to do with holding a pose.
At the fair itself the crown performed well beyond its humble construction, drawing exactly the sort of attention Otis had spent three years training himself to pretend not to want, a small crowd of neighbors and their children crouching down to coo at him, one of them producing, unprompted, a piece of banana he had done nothing to earn beyond sitting there looking regal, which he accepted with the weary graciousness of a monarch enduring the burdens of public life. He kept his outrage in reserve the whole time, a speech of considerable length concerning dignity and the sanctity of a rabbit's ears, ready to deploy the instant anyone treated the crown as a joke rather than the coronation it plainly was, and it was only somewhere between the third compliment and the second banana that he noticed he had stopped rehearsing the speech entirely and started posing on purpose, chin lifted, better side angled toward whichever camera happened to be raised.
By evening the petals were a little worse for wear and Katie finally slid the crown off over his ears, setting it on the side table with the particular care of someone who suspected it might be needed again. "You can drop the outraged act now, you know," she said, not unkindly, glancing at the banana peel still sitting by Otis's water bowl. Otis declined to respond, on principle, and settled into his spot beneath the hydrangea with his ears loose and his territory exactly as he had left it, though he found himself, in the quiet after the fair had emptied out of the street, filing the whole afternoon away not under Grave Miscarriages of Justice after all but into a new file entirely, one he had not needed before that morning, and wondering, without any real urgency, when the next occasion might come along that required a rabbit of his particular gravitas to get dressed up for it.