The Old Man and the Rabbit

“Where I come from, a person returns things to the place they belong,” the old man grumbles as an icy wind whips away the plume of his breath. He stumps through the swirling snowflakes across the SuperValu car park—deserted now, save for his own ’77 VW Dasher—toward the lone shopping trolley that’s rolled away and stuck in the brittle grass between the pavement and the motorway.

He could swear he’d checked the tarmac thoroughly, as is his habit, before bringing the rest of the trolleys in at the store’s closing. Some gobshite abandoned it out of sight and the wind swept it along until it got stuck here, he supposes. The old man tugs his woolen coat tighter against the biting cold, brushes snow from his eyelashes.

He is marching the trolley back across the lot when he notices it: in the basket, lying there, a child’s stuffed rabbit. He reaches down, grasps it, stops. Its worn fur is a dingy grey, though he thinks it must have been a garish pink, once, and where one of its plastic eyes used to be there is now only frayed thread, reaching out like an empty hand. His old eyes are sharp as they search the darkened lot, but he is, of course, quite alone. Everyone in the drowsy village of Draíocht will be hunkered down in the pub or tucked in beside their own hearths, waiting for this sudden winter storm to blow past.

The old man tucks the toy under his arm, secures the trolley beside the cold beige brick of the building, then walks to his waiting car, where he places the rabbit on the passenger seat. The tires slip only a little as he turns out onto the M20 motorway toward Limerick, past the main road into the village. As always, he glances at the homes he passes by, peers into their golden eyes—here a woman washing dishes at a steamy kitchen window; now a man sitting down to the evening news program as a cat’s silhouette on the sill follows the lights of the old man’s car; through this casement a boy can be seen hunched over schoolbooks at the dining table, his mother talking as she leans over his shoulder, pointing with a yellow pencil.

His own home will be vacant and dark. He does not own a television.

He looks over at the rabbit, its single plastic eye gleaming knowingly, the passing lights outside reflecting so that it seems as though the rabbit is looking around, taking in its new circumstances. The old man almost smiles at the notion but catches himself.

“Bloody eejit,” he scolds. The snowflakes spin and spin in the beams of the car’s headlamps.

In the narrow drive outside his house, the old man parks beneath the hawthorn tree, opens the car door. The snow is falling faster, an endless cascade of white overhead, and if he doesn’t cover the Dasher with a tarp, he’ll have to awaken an extra half hour early in the morning just to clean it off. Some amadáns clear only the smallest portion of the windscreen to see out of before setting off on snow-packed roads, but the old man will suffer no such laziness. He will take the time now to ensure all is set for the morning. 

He retrieves the tarp from its shelf in the garden shed, is unfolding its crisp creases over the roof, is tucking it snugly into the edges of the car, when he glimpses the toy rabbit through the window where he left it, on the seat. He will take it to the Lost Items bin at the SuperValu in the morning, so he’d seen no point in bringing it inside with him.

Its eye gazes up at him, expectantly.

He growls but wrenches the door open, snatching up the rabbit. “Stupid old fool.” He crams the rabbit in his pocket, finishes arranging the tarp, and finally, goes inside.

The old man’s house consists of: a sitting room, furnished with a reclining chair, floor lamp, and wooden desk; a kitchen with a single gas burner, small dinette and one chair beside its only window; a single bedroom containing a twin bed, a dresser, a wardrobe; a bathroom with one towel, one bar of soap, one toothbrush, a comb.

The old man stops just inside the door, clicking on the lamp in the sitting room, and views these rooms as if seeing them after some long absence. He is alone. He can’t recall a time when he wasn’t alone, although he supposes he must have once had a family. Parents, perhaps siblings. A lover. Someone to miss him while he was away, someone to watch for his return. Surely, he’d had that, once. 

He cannot remember.

He shrugs out of his coat, hangs it on the peg on the wall beside the door. The rabbit is slumped over, hanging out of the pocket where he’d shoved it, its long ears dangling down. Suddenly—he doesn’t know why—he takes the rabbit, holds it in his hands under the dim orange glow of the lamp. He runs a slender finger over the single eye and finds it to be not plastic, as he’d assumed, but something else. Something sharp-edged and warm to the touch.

A knock at his door makes him jump, and he curses, setting the toy in the reclining chair. “Who is it?” he calls through the wood, for he has no spyhole to see through.

“Let me in.”

The voice—is it a child? a woman?—stirs something deep within the old man’s breast, like the first twitch of a hibernating bear’s paw as the winter snows thaw. 

“Who are you? What do you want?” He is surprised at how calm he feels. No one, in all the long years he’s lived in this house, has ever come to his door.

“Let me in.”

The voice is different now, isn’t it? As though the one voice has branched and split into a dozen other voices, each with its own timbre and cadence.

The old man squares his shoulders, swallows, and turns the lock. 

On the doorstep, a child.

“Well?” the old man says, though his voice has lost that impatient bite, that harshness. His words, now, are whispered. “What do you want of me?”

“Will you permit me to come in? Only, it’s snowing,” the child points out, rather testily. The keen eyes watching the old man are a capricious yellow-green, like forest pools in summer.

The old man steps aside, and as the child passes into his home, the old man can smell earth, riverwater, the unmistakable aroma of honeysuckle pollen clinging to the hairs of a bumblebee. He feels almost dizzy with the stirrings of half-remembered things, images that wave and shimmer at the edge of recollection.

The child turns, peers up at him. How odd, the old man thinks remotely, that he cannot recall a single time another human has been in his home. But of course, the thought surfaces, this child is no human. This isn’t even a child. See how the snow hasn’t wetted the hair? The garments?

“Do you remember me?” the child that isn’t a child asks, with a voice like wind through reeds. “Do you know why I’ve come?”

“You…” His eyes turn, or are pulled, toward the observant eye of the tattered toy rabbit. “You’ve come to…take me back?” Why he should have formed this into a question, he cannot say. He knows now that is why this child, this messenger of the Queen, is here. Slowly, like wine soaking through linen, like a landscape taking shape through a dense fog, the memories come of the time before, of a life—his life, yes, of course—in the timeless kingdom of the aos sí. 

The messenger lifts a pointed chin, says in a courtly voice, “Her Majesty bids me inform you that your sentence of exile is complete. It is time to return.”

The old man nods. “I’ll need this, won’t I?” He reaches for the rabbit, and as he does so, he sees that the bronzed hand emerging from the faded tartan flannel shirt he’d buttoned that morning is once again broad and strong. He knows that, if he were to look at his reflection, he would find staring back not a sunken, bent man at the end of his life, silver-haired and face rent with wrinkles, but his own true form: straight-backed and tall, with hair the precise shade of a leaf that has fallen from a hundred-year oak on the morning after autumn’s first frost, his eyes bright and clear as the waters that trickle through the stones in the springs that feed the Abhainn na Sionainne.

“You can just take the eye, no need for the rest of it,” the messenger advises, gazing dispassionately at the tattered toy. “We needed you only to find the ancient stone, bring it within the walls of your dwelling, and lay a single finger upon its hallowed surface. Only then could I find you, only then could you invite me into your home, and only then could I bid you return.” The messenger’s fair brow furrows as the somewhat bored recitation concludes, a long-nailed finger reaches up to scratch at the side of the pointed nose. “Took your blessed time about it, if I may say.”

The man, not old any longer, smiles. He doesn’t have to touch his jaw to know his beard has grown back—the downy beard his beloved, his Queen, delighted in tangling her fingers in. 

“Apologies, messenger.” He gazes down at the pitiful toy in his hand. “I’ll take it with me,” he decides. At a disgusted scowl from the messenger, the man shrugs. “As a reminder not to take for granted my dearest’s benevolence again. Er…what was it I did? It has yet to return to memory.”

The messenger glares up at him with an air of long-suffering forbearance. “You were late in arriving to Her Majesty’s four thousand two hundred and eight-third birthday celebration and she was forced to lead the procession, unescorted, to her throne to oversee the festivities, the punishment of which she decreed to be an exile of seventy human years alone and friendless in the land of the mortals: ten years for every minute late you were in arriving.” The messenger sniffs haughtily. “Obviously.”

The man remembers now so clearly. He had decided to gather a posy of buttercups and cowslips as a last-minute gift for the Queen but his horse had stepped wrong, injuring a hoof, and he’d had to lead it back on foot. His beloved, the fairy queen Áine, could be as fierce and implacable as she was enchanting and passionate (oh, so terrifyingly passionate!). 

“Ah. Yes, thank you. Now I recall.”

“And since you recall,” the messenger is saying, flinging the door wide to the tempestuous howling of the storm, “you understand that we must make haste. The Queen will not be kept waiting.”

“Of course. Out of curiosity, how long have I actually been exiled?”

The messenger is absently checking pockets and pouches, ensuring all is ready for the journey back. “Let me see, what human year is this?”

“Two thousand and twenty-two.”

“Oh. Truly? Well then, since last Tuesday.” The messenger cocks a brow. “After you, my lord.”

The man tucks the rabbit with its single gleaming eye under one arm, not bothering with his coat, and follows the messenger willingly into the blinding snow.