The Cloaked Rabbit

I once lived in house with a cloaked rabbit in the basement. The rabbit was not a superhero or cold. It was simply a cloaked rabbit. In the basement.

We would see it. You had to cross a cold tile floor from the living room. The tiles would suck the soul from the palms of your feet. We wore shoes but it still worked. When we reached the door we would knock. And then we would open the door and sit at the top of the stairs peering through the poles.

The cloaked rabbit would be down in a corner. He would always be down in a corner. We never knew if he moved when we went away. This was why we knocked.

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It’s fair to ask the color of the cloak. I don’t know. We didn’t have lights in our basement. Only the beam of a window on the upper part of the basement wall. Sometimes a pastor or a salesman would stride past the ghost window. We’d only see the bottom of his shoes. That long line. Usually they were fine shoes in peppery black and dots. Once a mechanic stopped. Right there and we knew it was a mechanic because his big toe tapped. None of his other toes tapped. Just the big one. Later the cloaked rabbit said this was impossible. Biologically. Physically. He wasn’t clear. But you could only see out the window from the top of the stairs.

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My room was at the top of the stairs above the stairs to the basement. There, I was given a case for the president.

When my father walked past the door to the basement he would shut it. He didn’t like the draft. He would sit very quietly at both tables and read each morning. Archeology magazines.

My mother didn’t enjoy archeology. She enjoyed dancing. At breakfast and dinner she would dance. We would call her to the table. And she would keep dancing like she didn’t hear us. And we would get up on the backs of our chairs, as though trapped somewhere, and we would wave furiously for her to sit down.

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One hot afternoon we locked the basement and drove to Colorado. There was a wagon ride. There was a wedding. The pastor wore boots with a tall heel.

The mountains wore snow and wind.

We wondered if the horses could smell the rabbit. Their skins touched like flat stones.

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My brother broke his knee cap. The injury affected him his whole life. When he tells people people say, Your knee? And he says, No, my knee cap.

I only saw the second half of what happened.

He says during the first half, he slipped off the roof. Then I saw him clinging to an oak branch. Then he fell the rest of the way.

He sprang right up. Then he fell over holding his knee.

He spent a week in the hospital. I would look at my knee and wonder what could happen to my knee cap so I had to spend that long in a hospital bed. When he got home he didn’t want to see the cloaked rabbit.

Later he did.