Before it All Began

No matter how the boy cried, the rabbit was dead. It had always been his favourite out of the small herd his father allowed him to keep, hopping about the yard in soft white and creamy brown velvet which always felt the warmest to hug, no matter how she rolled in the hard dark earth. But those hopping legs were ruined now. They went without a sound, at least none that the boy had been able to hear; the rattle of father’s old car had been all too loud for anything. 

Father’s allowances were so far and few between. He stood beside the boy now, who was weeping, scraping the broken body out from under the tire. He stood, gaunt and stony. The rabbits had been an allowance. These few tears were another.

“Well, what’s done is done.”

The boy kept crying. His thin and tiny fingers pried at the shattered limbs until they came out from the dirty rubber. The fur, the body beneath it, was still warm, but the bones were crushed. It was just a bag of skin, a sagging pelt in his small hands. He cried into the soft ears.

“Papa…” he hiccuped. “She’s… you…”

Father’s eyelids pressed shut, his dark and straight eyelashes sighing with his lungs. It hadn’t been as if he had seen the little thing. Yet there the accusations were, lurking behind his son’s hiccups, shadowing each fragmented word. There he stood accused. These were the kinds of guilts that would truly follow him to the grave: evils perceived by his own flesh and blood, evils beside which he stood, stony as an obelisk. 

He would have to make another set of allowances, if he wanted any hope of fond remembrance by the only person on Earth that would be there, at his grave. 

The first was an old shoebox and garden trowel, and a shooing off out to the oldest parts of the cemetery that was his solitary kingdom, a kingdom to which the boy was the sole heir. It was the burial of that white and brown rabbit, far from and behind the new fields of the wardead that kept springing up like mushrooms, back amongst those graves so old that the concrete headstones were worn blank. It was a greater allowance than the boy would ever know. After all, his father was technically breaking the law in allowing it: animal remains were forbidden in human cemeteries, amidst all the new regulations. He did not attend the graveside service, partly so he would never know where those laws had been broken, partly so he did not have to continue to allow those tears on his watch.

The second was a quiet seat on the dark wooden porch, on the cheap wicker couch, upon the boy’s return from the cemetery. His green-yellow eyes were swollen from crying, so swollen they began to look more like his father’s own dark and hooded ones. He was not crying any longer, though.

Father held his arm in a beckoning round. The boy clambered up into it, dirt-covered trowel still in hand. “Put that shovel down.” 

The boy reached off the side of the couch, but even his eight-year-old lank could not reach far enough. It clattered onto the wood as he released it, soil breaking off everywhere. The father hissed a breath in through his yellowed teeth.

“I’m sorry, papa.” The boy began to move to clean as he had been taught he should do, but this time his father would not have him move. This time, his father held him tight.

“Just leave it for now. Settle down, son.” Father inhaled the green-black air as the boy coiled once again into his wiry arm. He gazed thinly upon the countless stones out in the yard—marble and concrete and granite, crosses and vases, stones and obelisks, monuments to which the two of them had already sacrificed their places amongst the living to protect and tend. He exhaled a cloud of breath and spirit, which the boy watched curl away and join the mists. “There was an old story your grandpa told me before,” father allowed, “a story about a very selfless rabbit, who put himself in harm’s way to help someone else.”

The boy sniffled. “Can the rabbit be a she? And white and brown?”

The father blinked longly. “Fine.” He took a breath again. “This rabbit was with three other animals—a monkey, an otter, and a wolf, I think—when an old beggar man came by. They all decided they had to get the man some food: the monkey climbed up a tree and got him some fruit; the otter fished; the wolf caught him a lizard. But the rabbit, he—she—didn’t know what to get the beggar. He knew humans like him didn’t eat grasses, like he did. But then he—she—thought, ‘I know. I’ll cook myself for him to eat!’ So she built up and hopped into a fire. But the fire wouldn’t burn her. Now, how could this be? Well, the beggar man turned around and revealed himself to be the king of all the gods of Japan. He said, ‘Rabbit, you have been so selfless to try to sacrifice yourself all for an old beggar. Your virtue will be rewarded for all time.’ And so the king reached up, and drew a picture of the rabbit onto the rock of the moon. 

“That picture is still there today, so whenever you look up at the moon, you remember to be selfless. You can’t keep crying about what you’ve lost, because what you give to others is what’s most important. Like how you gave that nice burial to that rabbit. Always give everything you have to those that need you. That’s what our whole lives are about here, at the cemetery. Alright?”

Father hadn’t told stories much, if ever, before. But all of a sudden, he had just opened like an unoiled door hinge, creaking like the dark wooden porch around them, and let this one out. The boy wasn’t sure he liked the sound—the sounds. There was the creak of his father, but also the rattle of something else—the moral, maybe. The moral rattled inside him, the rattle of an old car engine, unsteady and all too loud for anything.

“Alright, papa.”

The father shifted away from him now, satisfied at the allowance. “Now, sweep out that dirt.” The creaking door slammed shut again.