by Kelsey Liu.
To Eric Park.
In April, the goddess on the moon hit her rabbit for the third time.
“Why?” she cried, tears crumpling her exquisite face. “Why?”
The first time, the rabbit had crawled in circles, weeping. Eventually, it had convinced itself that centuries of companionship were, in fact, lucky to mar themselves with only one incident of humiliation.
The second time, the rabbit had hidden in a crater and fought down a slow and uncomfortable despair.
The third time, the blow broke the rabbit and turned it frantic and wild. Shrieking with rage, it punched the goddess with its hind legs and watched her stagger back, her mouth a flowering o.
During the next solar eclipse, the rabbit fostered sun blisters in the more belligerent craters until they took fire, one by one, and ate up the white dust of the moon. Half the globe spun red, bleeding in a roaring halo.
“Stupid animal!” the goddess cried, throwing her long blue sleeves over her slender white forearms. “Look what you’ve done!”
Ferocious with self-pity, she gripped both the rabbit’s ears with one smooth and delicate hand, and viciously boxed the rabbit’s nose and cheeks with the other. Wailing, the rabbit kicked free and rolled into a nearby crater, smearing its fur with red embers and black ash. The coloring transformed its sides and legs, but the rabbit had protected its face with its paws, and the eyes remained starkly circled with white fur. Thick streams of loose ash falling from its coat, the rabbit lunged again at the goddess.
With one unwavering throw, she cast the rabbit down into the ocean. The unexpected extraterrestrial punctured the sea, pushing the waves into huge uncomfortable shoulders of water that crashed self-consciously down onto the shoreline.
In India, in Bangladesh, in the coastal mango orchards, people shouted and ran from the tsunami, but not before they glimpsed a new deformed creature in the ocean. It matched, in parts, imported descriptions of a fantastical killer whale. But this was even more strange, floating—loosely somehow.
Gigantic and desperate compared to those on the earth, the rabbit cried and shrieked when it surfaced for air.
The people heard it screech and it terrified them. Already nervous from the recent blood moon, they hastily prepared pacifying offerings for the gods and threw baskets of overripe mangoes into the sea, so that for weeks the wind blowing in from the ocean smelled like salt rotting with the sweetness of fruit.
A small boy, black-haired and brown-skinned, sprinkled all over with pimple scars, found the rabbit curled up on the beach.
“Are you okay, mister?” the boy asked.
The rabbit looked up and issued a loud, shrill scream. The boy gave a surprised shout and clapped his hands to his ears.
“Sorry!” he yelled out. “Sorry! Are you okay, miss?”
“No,” the rabbit said. “I am exiled and wet.”
“And dirty,” the boy added. “You look really bad.”
The rabbit, who had always prided herself on the loveliness of her appearance, buried her large head into her soaked paws.
“That’s okay!” the boy cried hastily. “My grandma can get you washed up! She does all our laundry and she’s pretty good at it!”
He patted her sooty paw and until she felt well enough to follow him back home. Soon, they arrived at a pretty one-story house with a red roof and door. The boy cupped his hands in front of his mouth.
“Grandma!” he hollered. “I need your help!”
“What do you want!” a woman’s voice yelled back from inside.
“I found a new friend! She was crying by herself on the beach, so I brought her back with me!”
The grandma came out. She was an imposing woman with her hands on her hips. Her face was so creased and browned that it was difficult to find her eyebrows. The wrinkles hung almost over her eyes, and the weight of loose skin seemed to make smiling impossible for her. She stopped in the doorway, wearing a threadbare but clean red apron, and looked between her overly adventurous grandson and the wet, filthy lump of fur that trailed behind him.
“What is that?” she asked him.
“I,” the rabbit spoke up, suddenly a lot taller, “am the companion to the goddess Chang’e of the moon. I made the elixir of immortality for her for many centuries and I would appreciate it if you would wash my fur.” She quivered delicately, shivering from cold and nerves and pride.
The grandma squinted. Onlookers, who had started to gather the moment of the boy’s return, whispered loudly amongst themselves. The boy looked completely unperturbed.
“Come to the backyard,” she finally said.
The rabbit was hosed down and scrubbed with three bottles of dishwashing soap. The grandson firmly rubbed her dry.
“Are you feeling better?” the boy asked, brushing her paw to a silky shine.
“A little,” the rabbit said, her long left ear drooping onto the boy’s head.
“You can stay with us, Sister Rabbit, until you stop looking so sad. Grandma and I are fun to live with! And there’s mountains and the beach and orchards and a lot of stuff around for you to explore, okay?”
“Okay.”
“Okay. What do you want for dinner? You probably don’t eat meat, right?”
“Right.”
“Okay.” The boy hugged the rabbit’s neck. “You’ll feel better in a couple days!”
After a couple days of quiet backyard brooding and grooming, the rabbit ventured outside the village and tracked restlessly and aimlessly around until she saw the mountains.
She was surprised by the abundance of colors. From the moon, everything looked like vague smeared shades of blue and gray: hardly commendable for any extraordinary beauty. But from here, the mountains were mottled, dappled down their long sides with red and strangely rich browns, and yellow freckled through reams of green.
What a large place, she thought. Even for me.
“Sister Rabbit!” The boy ran up behind her. “Good to see you out! What’re you looking at? You seem serious!”
“The mountains. I haven’t seen anything like these before.”
“Of course not! What do you have on the moon, anyway? A bunch of dust and holes, right? It’s okay to be amazed by we have to offer.”
“The moon doesn’t just have holes,” the rabbit primly corrected. “It has craters. And it has me.”
“It had you,” the boy quickly corrected.
The rabbit looked at the yellow light resting softly on top of the mountains. “And now it just has her.”
The boy hummed, a serious look settling on his small face. “Was it lonely?”
“No… it was enough. We were enough. Anyway, on nights we weren’t I hid in a crater and closed my eyes. Then it was no trouble to believe there were others, all over the moon, doing the same, playing the same game we used to play…”
“Yeah,” the boy said softly. “It’s lonely down here, too.”
“I don’t want to be here,” the rabbit admitted.
The boy sucked in a loud breath. “You want to go back?”
“No,” the rabbit said. “I think it’s time for a change.”
“But how will you go anywhere? You can be safe here with us, because we’re all good people. But out there are bad men who probably want to catch you—and maybe even hurt you!”
“They won’t hurt me,” the rabbit snorted. “I’ve lived too close to immortality for too long.”
“But why leave? Grandma likes you. I like you. You can stay with us, you know.”
“I know,” the rabbit told the boy, nuzzling his sweaty hair. Still, she knew, from the moon a lot of things looked small.
They ate dinner together in the backyard, looking up at the sky. The boy balanced his plate on his knees and chewed with his mouth open, talking and laughing, telling her stories.
An hour later, the rabbit left. She bounded across the beach, freed but strangely pained. In her ears, she carried firm, parallel beliefs about being shamefully attached and inescapably large.
For months she traveled around the continent, stopping at nearly every village she saw to deliver her narrative, exciting fear and sympathy.
“She beat me,” she told the endless wide-eyed crowds. “She is powerful beyond imagining and cruel without bounds. She is a proper goddess, an angry one. Why shouldn’t she be, when the ungrateful men and women of the earth have abandoned their faith in her! For your sakes, may the blood moon be the only manifestation of her wrath.”
“She made the moon bleed?” some frightened youth would call out, face white, while the murmurs in the crowd grew more and more urgently concerned.
“Yes,” the rabbit said, “and don’t you forget it!”
Half a year later, the rabbit was a quarter-mythologized celebrity on the continent and a patronized peasant legend on the others. The sea smelled like mangoes all the time.
A job well done, she congratulated herself, and she allowed herself to go back to the boy.
Her return to the village was not a quiet affair. Drawn by the commotion, the boy stood in the middle of the main road, watching and waiting for her.
“Sorry I left,” she said once she was close enough, her stomach a festival of anxiety.
“That’s okay,” the boy said, looking considerably less emotional than she had expected.
“Are you mad at me?”
“No,” he said, hugging her neck tightly. “It’s not like we didn’t know where you were the whole time.”
“Really?” she asked, surprised. “How?”
“We have newspapers and radios and stuff, you know.”
“Oh.” She had assumed extraordinary word-of-mouth, but nonetheless, “Can I stay with you?”
“Yes,” the boy sighed, rolling his eyes. “Of course you can.”
“Thank you,” the rabbit said. “I think I’ve started to like the ocean.”