The Unwelcome Balloon

Feed me a grape, slavegirl.

                Out of the corner of his eye he glimpsed it, dangling there, like an unremembered name, the mysterious, floating menace. I don’t like it, he reasoned, it’s round like the sun and moon but close like birds. I should flee!

                At that he leapt from his perch, his body’s fat influence sending the cage bars, metallic and thin, into grim, responsive shivers. The violence was brief but final: the rabbit would not move.

                He had known these strange hanging things before. As a pup they glided over him, soft and insensible, these planetary gods. But they were mercurial, too, often vanishing even as they appeared. He wondered whether they were real beings, like him, or refractory phantoms spilled by the vertical blinds, where the sun played its magic. Or were they ancestors, come to watch over him? Or to judge him? Impossible to know. His pup’s brain ached with uncertainty.

                As he grew, the rabbit learned not to like new experiences. New smells brought danger. New people came with the smells. New spaces needed to be mapped and tracked. New foods threatened poison, some gardener’s revenge for the mischief his cousins made. New was taxing, difficult, open. New was the enemy of known. No, new would not do. The mature rabbit values the knowledge in his body, in his genes, in the racial memory of a billion beating hearts. Those hearts, like his, had survived not by choice but by instinct, grooving into the great Rabbit Brain, through millions of years of recurrence, the humble reward of old things: dependability. Old was safe. Old was restful. Old, like the powerless will of the prey, was, in its ancient way, a ritual, a respect.

                From the cover of his cage, from the perch under which he cowered, warding away the sky-stranger like a plastic, flat talisman, he concentrated very hard. I am a good rabbit. Here I am safe, where the round, close animal can’t find me. But what of the others? They’re in the kitchen! It can see them in there!

                 Twice, loudly, he thumped his back feet. Will they hear my warning about the round animal? They must. But why don’t they run? He thumped again, and again, insisting. Still they stayed in the kitchen, exposed, oblivious to the assassin lurking there in the air between him and them. It seemed unsure which to attack first. Almost imperceptibly it drifted toward one. Was that a breeze? Did it carry their scent to it? Then, almost imperceptibly, it drifted back, reposed, considering its kill. I must warn them! 

                Thump!

                Thump!

                Will it hear me and catch me here, under this perch? I have nowhere to run. But my warren must know! I will tell them!

                Thump.

Twice more, loudly, he brought down his back feet. Will they hear my warning about the round animal? They must! With a final, decisive kick at the grating, he split the room with his meaning. The bars enclosing him groaned in paroxysm. A fine powder snowed from the permanent white above.  

                THUMP!

Startled, his warren grew tense. They heard me! With a subtle liveliness his nose quickened. Now, at least, they had a chance. But they weren’t running from the sky-creature, and they weren’t hiding. They were looking at him, their eyes appalled. Run, he told them, run for cover! The round thing is floating! They only ignored it. Had they gone tharn? Had it scared them into stupor? He feared the worst for them. Soon, no doubt, the sky-thing would catch them. My warren is doomed!

                For what seemed to the rabbit a very long time—the length at least of an unhurried hay-grazing—one of the humans, the taller one, with the scanty fur and a smell of worry always on his skin, casually, indifferently, suicidally walked past the predator and, inexplicably, straight to the rabbit, who was, with all his small vigor, ardently wishing not to be approached. Is he crazy? He’s leading it to me!  The tall, patchy, stress-smelling one made unconcerned noises at the rabbit, who, in his fear, which was quickly turning to fury, made rageful communications at him with his tail, his ears, his pleading eyes. LEAD IT AWAY FROM ME!

                After standing over the rabbit for a few more moments—too many, the rabbit would tell you—the tall, unfurry, stress-smelling human arrived at a conclusion. As he did, a line from an old movie, which is something the humans look at when they tire of language or of each other, came into his head: “her mind is making a discovery.” In his soul he smiled. Without a word, he caught the air-animal by its thin, shining tail and took it away, out through the opening part of the wall where new things come in, and where the old things come back, and when he returned, as the old things unfailingly do, he was alone. The floating round animal was gone.

                How did he do it?? He vanquished the predator! He must be the bravest of all humans. No wonder he leads the warren. He is so tall and so valiant that he doesn’t need fur; his courage keeps him warm. And he always smells like work and worry, I bet, from fighting the dangerous ones. Next time I'll know: when the sky-creatures come, with all their ambivalent evil, my warren will conquer them. The worrying one will make sure of it.

                Having dispatched the balloon and made solid again the wall where the new things enter, surely to prevent a surprise raid from bigger, lighter, and more numerous balloons, the tall, unfurry, worrying one approached the rabbit, who, now convinced that the danger had passed, had climbed cautiously to the perch, where he had lain, plump and complacent, when the mysterious round stranger, that was too close to be sun or moon and too new not to be distrusted, first interrupted his evening, which, until then, had been just like the one before it, and like the one before that, and like every evening he could remember. Which is precisely how he, and all rabbits, intended it.