Flash Friday 6-6-14 Bones in Flash Friday

The delicate bones of Barky, the dwarf lop-ear, stuck up through the shoe box and the shallow earth like the mast of a ghost ship. My daughter’s cheeks were wet, but for a long time we just knelt in the tame back yard, new mown, damp with dew, enveloped in unpainted cedar planks of a good neighbor fence.

“He fought,” she said.

“I’m sorry?”

“Against death. He fought. He wanted to stay here. With me. In my yard.”

Parenting is an exercise in humility. From the instant of conception you start writing the speeches on mortality, sex, caution, god. You expect to deliver them from an armchair near a roaring fire, sage and wise and the child at your feet basking in the glow of your wisdom.

“Yes, honey, yes he did.”

No, it was that one eyed orange tom that gets into the trash, that ate the neighbor girl’s gerbil, that howls from the fence when the females come into heat. The course of one’s life is the peeling away of magic, layer by layer, until the world is stark, stark as the bones of a dwarf lop-ear.

I wasn’t about to hurry along the process. I can’t imagine the soul of a bunny putting up a fight, it’s all the more reason to respect someone who can.