The Hart

Mr. Rabbit stands before the trunk of the fallen tree. His paws sink to the fur in wet leaves, in the ground so full of rain it bubbles up in burps with every step. The air scoured after the storm except for the hard scents of blood and bone fragments and broken time.

Sunlight shifts from colorless to the afternoon’s thick nectar yellow.

Overhead a scatter of starlings search the sky in pieces.

Mr. Rabbit does not know if he recognizes her now.

The storm brought rains like they haven’t seen in a long time, winds like they haven’t heard in longer. Mr. Rabbit reaches to touch the doe’s face. Her eyelids just wide enough to let the light in.

Sodden leaves squelch behind him, green wood bends. He turns, his ears snapped up to full alert.

It emerges from the brush. It pushes itself on one—frond—or, or stomach-foot. The thing stops at the shadow of the treeline. The rabbit’s fur bristles. The air, empty now of the starlings’ stupid back-and-forth, holds only the sour oil of his fear leaching from his glands. Damselflies hove through its air, and fall, their wings pregnant with color, until carapaces burst apart in wet powder-puffs.

It has four… legs… now.

“She was my mother,” the thing

says

as Rabbit pisses on his own feet.

It looks at him.

“I—” Rabbit says.

“A little fawn cannot survive on their own.”

“I…”

Rabbit swallows. The yellow light shades to orange, and the after-storm sky hues to lemon peel, peach, rose petal. “No,” he says, at last. “No, of course not,” he says. “Of course not.”

The colors in the sky ignite and burn and bleed away.

“Come with me,” Rabbit says. He hops to follow the setting sun.

He feels it. The thing, watching him.

Rabbit glances over his shoulder.

“Everyone is this way,” it says.

“Y—yes… I must have, have been confused,” Rabbit says, turning around, heading east.

The

thing

walks beside him.

Under the wedge of the bitten-off moon, trails broken by scattered tree branches, whole limbs, leaves piled in drifts, the fawn’s steps clop! and splash!

Rabbit stops at the oldest walnut tree in the forest. The tree leans away from him. Its spread opens the ground into a rough tangle of root teeth and lightless space inside the mouth. It smells of mud and fungus and with a twitch of his ears, the Rabbit hears the rustle of spindly legs in every direction, digging holes through and through.

“Do you want to go inside,” the fawn says, into the blood-suffused flesh of Rabbit’s ear.

His mouth is terribly, terribly dry.

“I am afraid of the dark,” it says. “Don’t leave me alone in there.”

“We’ll keep going,” Rabbit says. “We’ll keep. Going.” He thumps his back feet on the earth. The contact jars him into moving again.

Rabbit hops through the dark. The—

the fawn—

beside him, its steps sometimes splashing, sometimes the hard strike of hooves, sometimes another sound entirely. Like the mewling of small voices in the back of a warren. Or the calls of night birds from the trees above them. Or the sliding serrated songs of grasshoppers and cicadas. He tries so hard not to look at the fawn. Rabbit’s nostrils full of his own stench. Full of the sweet rot of the flood-stirred silt poured over the ground when the waters receded. Where they haven’t, the must and the stillness and the dapple of fresh-laid mosquito eggs.

“I am so thirsty,” the fawn says.

Rabbit shivers.

“Where is there water to drink?”

He licks his snout. His own mouth cracked and painful. “That way,” he says, pointing with his paw. The path winds through misshapen boles, fallen branches full of leaves. Some distance beyond—faint even to his hot ears—nonsense murmurs of the creek. Laying back in its channel. Tired itself out, after its wildness and gibbering.

“Lead me there,” the fawn says, “please. I am just a little fawn.”

The rabbit shivers again, starting in his bones. “I don’t want to go to the water,” he says. “Not now, not after the flood.”

“I am just a little fawn,” the thing says.

There is no light at all, any more. There is still that sound. Maybe voices at the end of the warren. But they are closer in the dark. No—he is closer, to the end of the tunnels. He has been walking through them this whole time. The voices are louder. They squeal. They are not the voices of his children. The voices do not come from baby rabbit mouths, not the ones he knows. The voices are too wet, too ocular, flow too quickly around too many softening teeth.

“I’ll take you,” Rabbit says, into the dark warren,

the fawn beside him all along the winding path to the creek. The soil’s softer, the closer they get. The pads of Rabbit’s paws grow sticky with mud, and the mud stings, until he stops to sniff and recognizes the scent of his own blood beneath fear and stress and sweat. He pulls his ears down and his forepaws come away tacky with clots. He shakes himself and nettling itch rolls down his whole body, like his fur comes loose from his skin.

Rabbit’s heart pounds.

The fawn—the thing—waits.

Rabbit says, “What do you want?”

The thing tilts to one side. “I am a lost little fawn,” it says. Its voice leaks, and hardens, and full of spores. “I need someone to take care of me, now that my mother’s dead.” It shifts closer, the slide of falling rock, of decay underneath flesh, the flicker behind dappled leaves. “All you forest creatures can take care of me,” it says. Rabbit smells the air coming from it. Fertile and gaseous and swimming. “All of you will take care of me, so I won’t be alone, won’t you?”

Rabbit wants to step back.

The thing stares into him.

Rabbit blinks away stinging red from his eyes.

“I am thirsty,” the fawn says.

“This way,” Rabbit says, slinking to the creek.

They walk through waters until it seems clear enough to drink. The rabbit bends, sips, but his mouth fills with silt, and the grit scrapes his tongue, his cheeks. Awash with sand before he can swallow. He spits it out, and in the moonlight the eddies of the swollen creek reveal disturbance everywhere.

The fawn seeps through beside him. The water coils and foams. Around the fawn the creek hisses and spits up color like dancing, dying fireflies, like burning flowers. The hiss rises in pitch until the woods around them, disturbed, burst apart in clamor of flapping wings and shed feathers. The wrens take to dark sky and in their calls the rabbit hears panic, hears his friends cry out to him, birds he’s known since he was a kit and they just-fledged scream to him to find shelter, their voices rasping in confusion and still stupid with interrupted dreams.

It is not over quickly.

When it is over, the rabbit sits in the cold creek, wrens and pieces of wrens floating alongside. Soaked night colors of their ruined plumage lose oily sheen. Their open beaks too full of water, of reflected night, to hold any more warnings, any more questions, any more songs.

The fawn tosses its head.

“Aren’t you thirsty?” it asks.

The rabbit bends it neck, and drinks.

The thicket, the gathering place, at last. From this far, the rabbit smells the mix of scents. Badger, Squirrel, the flocks of birds, the numerous families of mice, all the daylight animals awake even now, talking and together in the aftermath of the storm. The nighttime animals’ silences pockets in the wood as they search for survivors.

The fawn stops. Its shadow moves, like broken fire and thorns. “Tell them I need help,” it says.

The rabbit swallows. His throat splits, just like the corners of his mouth. He tries to shout, to scream.

It raises its head. It says, “Please. I am just a little fawn.”

The rabbit sits in his too-loose skin. Hunkered inside himself. He looks over his shoulder, to the moonlit thicket. Where his friends are. Where his family is. Where his—where his children are.

He turns back. Under the silver light of the middle of the night, his shadow falls against the fawn’s, and his shadow moves, and the two shadows are one, a tangle, vibrating.

He drags himself into the thicket, where the others can see him. Squirrel and her husband stand to ask where he’s been. One of the mice, he can’t tell them apart, leaves to fetch his family. The rabbit raises a paw, opens his mouth. He wants—he wants to—

Badger says, “What happened to you?”

“I found someone,” he says. “A fawn. Doe’s fawn, it needs our help.”

The others look closer, move away. He spreads his paws. Dirt and mud fall from his claws. Scabs, too. “You’re—what happened?” Owl says, perched above. Her eyes wide and words slow. Bluejay next to her spreads a wing across her chest.

“He’s sick,” Bluejay says.

“No,” the rabbit says. “No, I found someone. I want looking. Doe was killed—a falling tree. But I found her fawn. It needs our help.”

The mouse returns with his wife, their children. The eight kits press against her. “Dear,” she says, “you’re, you’re not well, you’re injured, or sick, what happened?”

He sighs. He washes his paws against each other. “I’m fine,” he says. “Did anyone listen? There’s a little fawn that needs our help.”

“Rabbit,” says Fox, sliding in from the night. “Stop it.”

“Stop what?” the rabbit shouts.

“Dear,” his wife says. “Doe never

“I am a little fawn,” the thing says, moving into the thicket. Wren skeletons chitter on its antlers. Leaves squelch under its fronds, its stomach-feet. Furred veins and rhizomes slither inside translucent flat teeth. “I am scared to be alone.”

The thicket erupts into flight, chaos, shriek and the stink of sweat and piss and scat. The rabbit watches the animals scream and die and tear the earth in gouges, fleeing before the fawn as it takes them anyway. The rabbit watches as one at a time his friends, his family are impaled upon the fawn’s antlers, and each dead skin’s face lurches to stare at the rabbit, waiting for an explanation, an apology, anything.

The screaming lifts into the sky. The rabbit’s wife, his children, curse him, as they die.

“It’s a little fawn,” he says, to his shadow, vibrating, tangled up. “What was I supposed to do?”

The thing in joyous abandon thrusts a spine through the rabbit’s chest. The rabbit feels himself lifted into the air in breathless agony. The fawn tosses its head, bones rattling against antler, and with the last of his life bleeding out the rabbit sees everyone, everyone hanging beside him, and he is not scared, because he is not alone.