by Henry Seaward-Shannon
My cousin June’s kids, Daisy and Graham, were in the kitchen one day and they noticed something odd on the calendar. Their mother had drawn a deer wearing a lumberjack hat next to the date for the following day. In the evening they watched their mother very closely to see signs of anything unusual, and they did notice something a bit odd. She had bought tiny shoes for one of their pet rabbits and she was trying to get the rabbit to step into the shoes.
June had the rabbit on the table and she put the shoes in front of him, but after half an hour of June pointing at the shoes and saying things like ‘they’re for your feet’, the rabbit hadn’t moved at all. The kids got bored of this and they started watching a film on TV. The film was about a man on the night before his wedding. His fiancée’s cat had got stuck in a tree and he said it deserved to be stuck in a tree. Daisy and Graham forgot about the rabbit until their mother said, “He did it!”
When they turned around, the rabbit was standing in the shoes. June took the shoes off and tried to get him to do it again, so the kids could see it, but when she put the shoes in front of him he didn’t move. Daisy and Graham spent the next hour looking back and forth between the rabbit and the TV, but mostly at the rabbit. It always looked as if he was just about to move. But then they devoted all of their attention to the film when the man in it was telling a hovercraft that he’s having serious doubts about the wedding tomorrow. The hovercraft seemed to be responding too – the sound of its engine would rise and fall. Daisy and Graham wondered where the hovercraft came from.
They were still thinking about this on the following morning when the post arrived. On one of the letters they saw a stamp that had an image of a seagull stealing a letter from a postman. Graham said, “Wasn’t there a scene in the film where a seagull stole that man’s shoes?”
“No, you’re thinking of the rabbit,” Daisy said.
“The man didn’t have shoes when he was talking to the hovercraft.”
Daisy thought about this and said, “I thought he left his shoes on a lawnmower. And then he found them later.”
“I don’t remember that.”
They took the rabbit into the garden and put him on the ground near the lawnmower, and then they put the shoes in front of him. There was a battery on the ground too, and the rabbit kept looking back and forth between the shoes and the battery. Daisy pointed at the shoes and said, “Shoes. Shoes.” The rabbit eventually stood on the battery and Daisy shook her head.
June’s sister, Rachel, called around to see them. She watched the rabbit for ten minutes as it stood in front of the shoes, but when it finally moved, it went around the shoes. Rachel thought it looked just like a knight moving on a chess board, and that’s when they got the idea of playing chess with the rabbits because they had one black rabbit and a white one.
They arranged a chess board on the lawn, with things like flowerpots and watering cans representing the pieces. One of the rabbits was a bishop and the other was a knight. Rachel was the only one who really knew how to play chess, so Daisy, Graham and June all played against her. It became clear very early on that Graham didn’t know how to play chess at all. He knelt down on the grass next to the rabbit and said, “Jump. Jump!” He was trying to get it to jump over the king.
“That’s draughts, not chess,” Daisy said.
“Oh right,” Graham said. Then he turned to the rabbit again and said, “Jump. Jump!”
After that, Daisy and her mother got Graham to move the pieces around for them. He had no idea what was going on, and he was getting more confused all the time. After about half an hour, a bird flew off with a pawn, and one of the rabbits made a move across the board. Daisy and June said to Graham, “Block him with the rook. The rook!” They pointed at the rabbit and the rook, but this only confused Graham. He looked at them and looked at the rabbit, and then he stood on a battery. Daisy shook her head and June sighed. A deer in a lumberjack hat walked by. He stopped for a while and shook his head too.
The End
Originally posted 10/19/2005
