Following Rabbits
After putting away all of the hats, taking them from the hat boxes and hanging them on the racks mounted on the walls, he began walking back toward the house. Halfway across the yard, he noticed a peculiar thing. Skins. Rabbit skins. Three of them, hanging in front of the house. Fresh ones.
“Well, I’ll be,” John said. “She actually did it,” he marveled to himself.
“I wouldn’t be so sure,” a voice said behind him.
John turned and looked. It was the rabbit from that morning, the one that had
come into his shed; he was sure of it.
It was John’s turn to look puzzled, and tilted his head. The rabbit’s nose twitched and he did likewise, keeping his beady, pink eyes on John’s. “Did you say something?” John asked.
The rabbit went back on its hind legs. “Your wife didn’t do that.” The rabbit tilted his head toward the skins.
“Who did?” John asked.
“I think you know,” said the rabbit.
John turned away from his new friend and muttered, “Brom,” under his breath. He left the rabbit standing there and went inside.
The house was quiet and dark. He quietly slipped his boots off at the door and walked as silently as he could to his bed. Meredith was there, but she was awake. He knew this without having to see her because she wasn’t snoring. He undressed down to his underwear, then slid into the bed with his wife.
“How did it go?” she asked quietly.
“Not good,” he said, closing his eyes.
Silence.
“John?”
“Hmm?”
“I’m ready for another baby.”
“I know, Meredith,” John said, his eyes closed, but sleep nowhere near. Of all the things he was losing — his money, his hair, his teeth — it was his sleep that he missed the most.
“Why can’t you give me another baby?”
“I don’t know, Meredith,” John said. “I can try though.” He rolled over on his side and put a hand on her stomach.
There was a moment of silence, then Meredith sighed and rolled away from him. “No,” she said. “It always ends the same. You getting what you want, and me being disappointed all the way around.”
John’s eyes twitched in the darkness. He gritted his teeth despite the pain in his gums but said nothing. He laid in the darkness next to his wife and waited for sleep to come. Eventually, Meredith began to snore, and some time after that, he fell into a light, fitful sleep that he awoke from not long after, unrested.
~*~
When Brom arrived to pick up his money, John was hard at work in the shed, curing felt and stitching brims and hatbands. Brom pushed the door open so fast that it slammed into the wall and knocked several finished hats from their racks and onto the floor. John was so startled by Brom’s entrance that he jabbed the needle through the hat brim and poked himself in the finger.
“Have you got my money, hatter?” Brom bellowed.
John smiled, then stuck his finger in his mouth and sucked the blood away. “Brom, how are you?”
“Money,” Brom said. “Where is it?”
John clambered out of his chair and went to a cabinet in the back of the shed. Inside he pulled an old leather pouch tied around the top with a piece of carpet string that he used for his hats.
“Now, Brom,” John said handing the money over, “I wasn’t able to get the whole hundred shillings like you requested, but I think you’ll be happy with—”
Brom held one hand up, stopping the hatter’s words in his mouth. He untied the string and dumped the bag’s contents into his palm. He used his big, cigar-like finger to count the coins and then dumped them back into the pouch. “There’s only sixty-two shillings here,” Brom said.
“Yes, I wasn’t able to—”
John saw Brom’s fist coming but was too slow to prepare for it. It smashed into John’s face popping his nose like a tomato and breaking one of his front teeth off at the gum line. John fell backwards onto his tailbone which also cracked. Blood rolled down his lips and over his chin. He spat the tooth out of his mouth in a spray of blood.
“This barely covers the interest, hatter,” Brom said, “but I’ll take it. Next time, you pay in full or I may not be as lenient.”
very very good