MEANS YOU.
It was a hot, windless day, and within an hour blowflies arrived and settled on the faces of the two dead animals. Their buzzing attracted a frog, who jumped over from the nearby stream, flicked out his tongue, and dined upon them until he was full. Only then did he read the sign and turn to address the rabbit. “Seeing as you don’t want jokes or questions, I guess I’ll phrase this as a comment,” he said. “In order to enter through your gate, I’ll have to stop and go through your tiresome rigmarole. That kind of BS doesn’t interest me much, so instead I’m going to return to my stream and swim into your third-rate, beetle-infested forest.”
He turned to leave, and the rabbit, who was nothing if not quick, reached for his heavy stick. Then he hung the frog upon his gate and added NO CURSING to his NO TRESPASSING sign.
It wasn’t long before an otter came along and went for the crushed frog. Then a badger stopped by, attracted by the smell of the dead otter. As the bodies were heaped upon the gate, it began to tilt. The rabbit propped it up with a fallen branch and then turned his attention to the sign. NO DIRTY LOOKS, he wrote. NO QUESTIONING MY INTEGRITY. NO INSULTING REMARKS ABOUT MY EARS OR MY TEETH. He was just wondering how to spell “insolence” when a shadow fell, and he looked up to see a magnificent white unicorn. His silky mane curled about his neck in waves the color of buttercups. Equally brilliant was his horn, which looked to be made of gold. At his approach, the rabbit put down his pencil. “State your name and your business.”
“I’m a unicorn,” said the unicorn, “and I come to bring joy to all the forest creatures.”
“Not with that horn you don’t,” said the rabbit.
“I beg your pardon?”
“I said, lose the weapon.”
“The horn is what makes me who I am!”
“Which is unwelcome,” said the rabbit. “Now do as I say or beat it.”
“But happiness follows wherever I go!” the unicorn protested. “I can make a rainbow just by flicking my tail.”
The rabbit reached for his stick.
“If you won’t let me through the gate, I’ll just jump over it,” said the unicorn. And because he was taller than the rabbit and much more powerful, he did just that. “Sorry,” he said as he headed into the forest, “but you didn’t leave me any choice.”
“We’ll see about that,” muttered the rabbit, and he spat onto the blood-soaked ground.
The unicorn spent the late afternoon making rainbows for all the woodland creatures. Then he caused the wildflowers to bloom and conjured up some berries for a hungry box turtle. As the sun set over the treetops, he settled upon a bed of fragrant moss and fell into a deep sleep.
The following morning, the songbirds woke him. The unicorn yawned and was just about to stand when he noticed the pile of golden shavings scattered across the moss. Then he felt his forehead and galloped to the gate piled high with rotting carcasses. “Who chewed off my horn?” he wailed.
The rabbit answered calmly that rules were rules. “If I let you trot around with a weapon on your head, I’d have to let everyone do it.”
“But it had magic powers!”
“I said, scram,” said the rabbit.
The unicorn, just a common everyday horse now, slunk off toward a field of tall grasses. The rabbit watched him go and then turned back to his sign. “Magic powers indeed,” he muttered. “I didn’t taste anything special.” Again he spat, only this time, a diamond came out and landed on the ground beside him. That’s what he was staring at when the wolves arrived.
The Judicious Brown Chicken
It was hot that afternoon, so after the chicken and her sister had walked the yard a few times, they wandered into the henhouse for a little shade. Had it been crowded they probably wouldn’t have said much, but there was no one around, and so the two spoke intimately, the way they had when they were young. “I don’t know if it’s normal or what,” the sister said. “But sometimes… and this is just between the two of us, okay?”
The chicken nodded.
“Sometimes, when I’m with the rooster, I wonder what it would be like if he, you know, wasn’t a rooster.”
“You mean, like, if he was a duck or a goose?” The thought was ridiculous, and the chicken had to bite the inside of her beak