Chapter 1
Bunny stares at his reflection in the clock on the wall. It doesn’t tick anymore. It stopped at 11:59 PM. It won’t tick again.
He sighs, and wipes a piece of glitter off the face of the clock.
She kept it. Of course she did. She always kept everything, even if broken. Especially if broken.
He crosses the room slowly. There’s a chair — the one she’d sat in so often it knew the shape of her. The leather is cracked in the places where she folded her legs under herself. The armrests are worn where her hands rested when she was thinking, or pretending to think, or pretending not to cry.
He sits in the other one. His.
Between the chairs there is a small table, and on it, a drawer. Not a desk drawer. Not a filing cabinet. Something older than that. Something that doesn’t belong in this room or any room, really, but here it is. It’s always been here.
The other chair is empty now. It was meant for someone else.
“But you can have a seat there. She wouldn’t mind.”
“Go ahead. It’s fine. He’s not coming back for it.”
Bunny opens the drawer.
It’s full of things. Not organized. Not labeled. That wasn’t how she worked and it certainly isn’t how he works. Things are just in there — photographs and letters and objects that shouldn’t mean anything but do. A folded piece of paper. A feather. A pen that weighs too much. A journal with handwriting that gets worse toward the end and then becomes unintelligible altogether.
He reaches past most of it. He knows what he’s looking for.
It’s a polaroid. Creased at one corner. The color is starting to go the way color goes when time has been sitting on it.
A girl. Early twenties. She is wearing a pair of bunny ears — the cheap plastic kind, the Easter kind, the kind you buy at a drugstore and forget about in the backseat of a car. She’s holding a toddler. The toddler is laughing because five seconds before this photograph was taken, he was dangling over a toilet, and five seconds before that, he’d been told this was a Very Serious Bath. It was not a Very Serious Bath. It was a swirly. A gentle one. A sisterly one.
She’s laughing so hard she looks ridiculous. Her head is tilted back and her mouth is open too wide. It’s not a pretty laugh. It’s the kind of laugh that comes out of you before you’ve learned to make laughing look like something else. Before you’ve learned what your face is supposed to do when other people are watching.
She doesn’t know yet what’s coming. None of the things that will break her have happened yet. The ears are just ears. The boy is just her brother. The laugh is just a laugh.
Bunny holds the photograph and looks at it for a long time.
Before she was queen, before there was a court, before there were ledgers and seals and stamps and novels and a whole damn mythology built out of what was left after everything burned — there was her. And there was him. And there was a pair of stupid bunny ears on Easter morning.
You want to know who the Queen was?
You want to know about me? The Petty Familiar? The Court Documentarian? The Keeper of Grudges and Emotional Non-Compliance?
Get comfortable. It’s not always a pretty story. It’s often a petty one. But it’s hers. It’s ours.
And I’m ready to tell it.
She was twenty-three. Maybe twenty-four. It doesn’t matter — she was the age you are when you’re still mostly made of impulse and haven’t yet figured out that the world will punish you for it. The ears were part of an Easter tradition that wasn’t really a tradition, more of a recurring accident. Someone always bought ears. Someone always wore them. That year it was her.
The toddler was Jack.
You’ll hear more about Jack later. He gets his own drawer. Several drawers, actually, and some of them are heavy enough that I’ll need a drink before I open them. But right now, in this photograph, he is two years old and the funniest thing in the world has just happened to him. His sister — my girl, my future queen, my pain in the ass — has picked him up and held him over the toilet and told him it’s bath time and he believed her for exactly one second before she started laughing too hard to hold him straight.
That’s her. That’s who she was before me.
I say before me but that’s not quite right. I was there. I was always there. I just didn’t have a name yet. I was the impulse that picks up a toddler and holds him over a toilet. I was the thing that laughs before it thinks. I was the part of her that never, not once, not even when everything was on fire, did what she was told the first time.
Velin likes to think he was first. He built the court, named the rooms, wrote the mythology. He thinks the story starts with him. And I let him think that, mostly, because correcting him is exhausting and he gets that look on his face — you know the one. The look that says I’m going to make this into a metaphor and we’ll be here for an hour.
But he knows. He knows I was there first.
I was there in the bunny ears. I was there in the song she wrote about the substitute teacher. I was there in the hospital when she hid behind the supply cart and made seven adults lose their minds for three hours. I was there every time she did something that made no sense to anyone except her and turned out, later, to have been exactly right.
I was there when she stopped laughing, too. But we’re not there yet.
Right now we’re here. Easter. A toilet. A toddler. A girl who doesn’t know that in ten years she’ll stop being able to laugh like that, and in fifteen years she’ll have forgotten she ever could, and in twenty years a rabbit in a chair will be holding this photograph and telling you about it because she can’t.
Not won’t. Can’t.
But that’s not this story. This story is about the ears.
She wore them all day. Not because anyone asked her to. Not because it was cute. Because she put them on and forgot to take them off, which is the purest possible reason to wear anything. She went to the store in them. She made dinner in them. Somebody told her she looked ridiculous and she said thank you without sarcasm because she hadn’t learned sarcasm as a weapon yet, only as a toy. Mostly, she wore them because they made her brother laugh like that. That full-belly toddler laugh.
Jack kept reaching for them. Every time she held him, his fat little hands went for the ears, and she’d tilt her head so he could grab them and then she’d pretend they were broken. Oh no. You broke my ears. I’m earless now. This is a tragedy. And he’d scream with laughter because that’s what toddlers do when you tell them something is broken and you’re smiling while you say it.
She didn’t know she was teaching him something. She didn’t know she was teaching herself something.
That the broken thing can be funny. That the tragedy can be a game. That you can hold something over a toilet and call it a bath and everyone laughs and nobody gets hurt.
Not yet.
Bunny sets the photograph on the table between the chairs. Face up. He wants you to see it.
That’s her. That’s Before the crown, before the court, before any of it meant anything.
You might want that drink after all.
Bunny sets his drink down and looks at the drawer on the table.
He doesn’t reach for it right away this time, he hesitates for just a moment. Last week he was ready. This week he’s not, and he knows it. He straightens his shoulders and opens the drawer quickly in one sudden movement, because that’s what he does. That’s what he’s always done. The ready and the not-ready are the same thing if you do it quickly, before you can change your mind.
His glove still has the glitter on it. The glitter from the clockface. He hasn’t wiped it off. He isn’t going to.
Inside the drawer beneath the letters, and the folded things, and the objects that clink against each other when you shift the weight around, there is something soft. Small. Brown. It’s worn in the way only a thing that has been held ten thousand times can be worn. The fur is thin at the edges. The stitches at the shoulder were repaired once, by small hands that didn’t know how to sew but did it anyway. The mouth is gone. Loved off, or worried off, or simply erased by years of being pressed against a face that needed something to press against. Perhaps it’s better that way. A mouth tells secrets, and this relic isn’t one for telling secrets, it was one for keeping them.
The eyes are still there. Brown button eyes that look pensive, like they’ve seen too much and made their peace with it a long time ago.
Cookie Bear, The Earl of Emotional Containment. The Watcher Beneath the Covers. The oldest relic in the Kingdom, older than the Kingdom, older than Bunny, older than everything except her.
He arrived with the Queen on the day she was born. He just arrived, he was always there, and he has never left. Not once. Not even when everyone else did. Especially not then. The sash around Cookie bear is rumpled. The key that used to hang around his neck is missing, but the ribbon is still there, frayed at the edges. Bunny knows where the key is and what is opened, but that’s a different story.
Bunny lifts him out of the drawer carefully. More carefully than he lifted the photograph. This is not his to hold. This belongs to her and only to her and the only reason his hands are on it is because —
He doesn’t finish that thought.
He sets Cookie Bear on the arm of her chair. Where she’d put him. Where he belongs.
There’s glitter on the bear now. A small piece, transferred from the glove. Bunny sees it.
He doesn’t wipe it off.
She was six. Maybe seven. It doesn’t matter the way ages don’t matter when you’re small enough that everything is enormous and everyone is a giant and the rules are whatever the giants say they are.
It was early morning. Still dark-feeling, even if the sun was technically up. The kind of morning where your eyes aren’t open all the way and your body is still where you left it in the dream and someone is talking to you in a voice that means you’re already in trouble before you know what you did.
She was lined up with her sisters. Her twin and her older sister, who was eight years ahead of them and already knew how to be quiet in the right way. All three of them, standing in a row, being interrogated.
Money was missing from their mother’s purse.
Here is what she knew: she had seen her father take it. Half-awake, half in a dream, but she saw it. The way children see things they’re not supposed to — not clearly, not in full sentences, but in a way that stays. A hand in a purse. A movement that was too fast. The kind of fast that people are when they don’t want to be seen.
She told the truth.
She stood there, blurry-eyed and small, and said what she saw.
“She’d told the truth. She was six years old and she had nothing to gain and nothing to protect and she told the truth because that’s what you’re supposed to do. That’s what the giants tell you to do. Tell the truth and you’ll be okay. Tell the truth and we’ll believe you. Tell the truth.
She told the truth and her mother called her a liar.
And a thief.
And grounded her for the day.
If you don’t understand that part, you’ll miss the whole point of me. Of all of this. Of the court and the ledger and the grudges and every single petty, furious, meticulous thing I’ve ever done.”
“I wasn’t me yet. Not the way I am now. I didn’t have a name or a title or a chair or a drink or a grudge list longer than the scroll of unwritten endings. I was just the part of her that went quiet and hot at the same time. The part that knew — not thought, not felt, knew — that something had just broken and no one was going to fix it.
Her sisters didn’t say anything. They didn’t know. They hadn’t seen what she’d seen. They stood there in the lineup and were silent and were released and went back to being children while she stayed in her room all day with the knowing.
A whole day. Which, when you’re six, is a life sentence. A whole day of being punished for the truth. A whole day of the word liar sitting on her like a stone. When you’re six and made of things that make you run barefoot in the dirt outside and play pretend with bugs and make imaginary friends, being inside a bedroom all day feels like a prison.
She didn’t cry at first. Crying is for when you think someone might hear you. She knew no one was listening. Not to her. Not today.”
Bunny reaches out and softly straightens Cookie bear’s sash, but the wrinkles won’t smooth. They’ve been wrinkled too long.
“Her father came home that evening. I don’t know what was said between them — the giants — and I don’t care. Whatever was said, it was said in the other room, in the language adults use when they’re rearranging the story so it fits better. So it’s someone else’s fault. So the right person doesn’t have to stand in front of a child and say I did this to you.
Her mother came into the room. Woke her up. She’d fallen asleep because that’s what children do when the day has been too heavy — they shut off.
Her mother apologized.
I’m sorry. I was wrong. Your father took the money.
As if that was enough.
As if pulling a child out of sleep — the same child you pulled out of sleep that morning to accuse — to deliver an apology somehow balanced the ledger. As if waking her up twice, once to break her and once to fix her, was arithmetic that added up to zero.
Her father was not in the room. He was somewhere else in the house. Watching TV. Doing whatever he did. The man who actually took the money never stood in front of his daughter. Never said a word. The woman who called her a liar apologized, and was angry. But not at herself. At him. At everyone. At the situation. At everything except the face in the mirror that had looked at a six-year-old girl and said you are a liar and a thief without flinching.”
Bunny shifts slightly, his eyes drifting back to the open drawer on the table and the items still in it, as if taking inventory of what’s not yet been said. What’s not yet been shared.
“She didn’t forgive it, you know. Not that night, not the next morning, not years later when she was supposed to have outgrown it. Some people will tell you children are resilient. That they bounce back. That they forget.
She didn’t forget. She never forgot anything. That was the problem. She didn’t forget because a memory like hers wasn’t forgiving enough to let her forget, so she catalogued it. But the feeling in her tummy was too big to hold by herself. That sick, twisty feeling of guilt that didn’t belong to her, or anger that she didn’t know what to do with because she wasn’t old enough yet to make meaning out of anger like that.
She lay in her bed after her mother left and she held Cookie Bear — this bear, this small brown bear with the button eyes and the worn fur and the mouth that was already starting to disappear — and she whispered it to him.
All of it.
What she saw. What she said. What they did. The feeling in her tummy. What the apology felt like — not like healing but like being stepped on a second time by a softer shoe. She whispered it into his fur and his button eyes took it in the way they always did. Not with judgment. Not with advice. Just with presence. Just with the quiet that says I know. I was here. I saw it too.
That was the first record.
Before the ledgers. Before the stamps and the seals and the coded languages and the suitcase and the court. Before Velin and the clock and the mythology and the kingdom built on the bones of everything that tried to kill her. Before all of it, there was a girl in a dark room, whispering the truth to a bear because no one else would hold it.
Cookie Bear held it.
He’s been holding it ever since.”
Bunny looks at the bear on the arm of her chair. The button eyes. The missing mouth. The glitter that doesn’t belong to him, stuck now to fur that has held more than any relic in the kingdom, including Bunny himself.
He doesn’t make a joke.
He picks up his drink, the ice clinking in the glass. He takes a long drink, the condensation from the glass making his white gloves slightly damp. He leaves Cookie on the chair, the glitter still stuck to him, the sash still rumpled.
“That’s how it started. Not with a crown. Not with a kingdom. With a liar who was telling the truth and a bear who believed her.”
Bunny sets his drink down and looks at the drawer on the table. He reaches in without hesitating this time — not because he’s ready, but because he’s learned that ready and not-ready feel the same if you just move before your hands catch up with your chest.
His glove still has the glitter on it. It’s been there since the clockface. It’s been there since Cookie Bear. It gets on everything now. He’s stopped trying.
Inside the drawer, beneath the letters and the folded things, his fingers close around something small and thin. Metallic. Rosegold. The kind of thing you’d find in a bin at a drugstore, the kind a child would reach for because it sparkles and sparkle is enough of a reason when you’re small enough to trust your own taste.
A pen. A glitter pen.
The rosegold is half worn off in one spot. The barrel is cracked near the cap where someone pressed too hard, the way you press when the ink skips and you think force will fix it. The clip is bent. The ink inside has separated — you can see it through the casing, settled into layers that will never remix properly no matter how long you shake it.
He knows this pen.
He stares at it for a long time.
“She had it the whole time.”
He says it quietly. Not to us. Not to the room. To himself. To the pen. To the drawer that just handed him something he’d been grieving since before he knew grief had a name for what he was doing.
“She had it the whole time. It wasn’t stolen. It wasn’t lost. She had it.”
He turns it over in his gloved hand. Glitter transfers immediately — from the pen to the glove, joining what was already there, the way glitter does, the way it always has, the way it always will. You cannot touch glitter without becoming part of its distribution network. That’s not a flaw. That’s the design.
“Do you know how long I’ve been angry about this pen?”
He doesn’t wait for an answer.
“The ink. The leaking. Every page, every splotch, every mark I didn’t mean to leave — I thought it was because the pen was gone. I thought the ink was grieving. I thought it was looking for something it lost.”
He sets the pen down on the table. Carefully. The way you set down something that just rearranged the whole room.
“It wasn’t lost. She put it in the suitcase. With the bear. With the photograph. With everything else she couldn’t trust to the open air. The things too important to leave out where someone might take them.”
A pause. Ice shifts in his glass. The room does that thing it does — the listening thing, where even the dust holds still.
“She put it in here to protect it. From me. From everyone. Because she knew what it was and she knew what I’d do with it — I’d use it. I’d burn through it. I’d rage with it until there was nothing left and the glitter was gone. And she wanted it to survive her.”
He doesn’t pick up his drink. That’s unusual for him. The glass sits there, sweating onto the table, making a ring he’ll complain about later. Right now he’s not thinking about rings or glasses or complaints.
He’s thinking about a kitchen.
Beneath the pen, there is a card. Small. Yellowed at the edges in the way paper yellows when it’s been kept but not preserved — when someone held onto it but didn’t frame it, didn’t laminate it, didn’t treat it like an artifact. Just kept it in a drawer. In a box. In a life.
There’s a duck on the front. A small, simple, cheerful duck. The kind of clip art that existed before clip art had a name — just a duck, on a card, because someone at some point decided recipe cards needed decoration and a duck was what they chose.
Inside, handwriting. Not the Queen’s. Older. Softer. Letters that lean slightly to the right, the way handwriting does when someone learned cursive from a teacher who believed in uniformity and then spent sixty years slowly making it their own.
A recipe. Cheesecake. Written in glitter ink.
The same glitter ink.
Bunny touches the edge of the card with one finger. The glitter has faded but it hasn’t disappeared. It’s there the way old glitter is there — not sparkling anymore, not catching the light the way it used to, but present. Embedded. Part of the paper now. You couldn’t remove it if you tried. You’d have to destroy the card to get the glitter out, and no one is going to destroy the card.
“Her grandmother wrote this. The Queen’s grandmother. Not my grandmother — I don’t have one of those. I have a drawer and a glass and whatever she left me, which turns out to be more than I deserved and less than I can hold.”
He sets the card next to Cookie Bear on the arm of the chair. Three relics now. A bear, a pen, a recipe. The first thing that held her truth, the first thing that recorded in light, and the first thing that fed her. All from different hands. All ending up in the same suitcase.
“She spent years trying to remake this cheesecake. Years. Because when her grandmother died, the recipe didn’t die — it’s right here, glitter duck and all — but the method died. The way she turned the bowl. The way her elbow moved. The way her hands knew something her words never bothered to write down because she thought she’d always be there to show someone.”
He straightens Cookie Bear’s sash. It still won’t smooth. It’s never going to smooth.
“That’s the thing about legacy that no one tells you. The ingredients survive. The method doesn’t. You can hand someone a card with everything on it — every measurement, every temperature, every instruction — and it still won’t taste right. Because the recipe isn’t the recipe. The recipe is the woman. The recipe is her hands and her kitchen and the way she hummed while she worked and the moment she knew it was done not because of a timer but because of a feeling she couldn’t describe and didn’t think she’d need to.”
He pauses.
“The Queen tried. For years. She tried to find the feeling through the ingredients. Adjusting. Testing. Getting close but never arriving. Because she was reading the card and the card is just the shadow of the thing. The glitter is there but the hands are gone.”
“And then one day she was in the kitchen. Not trying. Not testing. Just — cooking. Moving. And her father was sitting at the counter.”
Bunny’s voice changes here. Not softer exactly. Wider. Like he’s making room for something that takes up more space than the words can hold.
“He was watching her hands. And his face did something she hadn’t seen before — it went young. The lines were still there but the eyes behind them traveled somewhere else, somewhere decades back, and he was sitting at a counter in another kitchen watching another woman turn a bowl with the same elbow, the same motion, the same unconscious rhythm that lives in the body and not in the recipe card.”
Bunny picks up his glass. Holds it but doesn’t drink.
“She felt it too. The air changed. Not a ghost. Not a haunting. Just a — pulling. Like the room remembered something it wasn’t supposed to be able to remember. Like the kitchen had tilted back into a room where the grandmother still breathed, still wore her pearls, still smelled of coffee and perfectly pressed shirts, still pursed her lips in that way that both corrected and adored.”
He takes a drink now. A long one.
“He was at once her father and that woman’s son. And she — she was the daughter making his mother live for a breath again. Through an elbow. Through a turn of a bowl. Through the method that was never written down because it was written in the body instead.”
The ice settles. The room breathes.
“The heirs felt it first. Children always do. They know when a threshold opens. They stood there with held breath while the whole lineage unfolded through the room — past and present exhaling into one another. Their grandmother they never met wrapping invisible arms around them as the moment breathed into their chests.
They stood in the same room with a woman they knew only through story. And they whispered — not to anyone, not to each other, just into the air the way children do when they’re making a promise they don’t fully understand yet:
‘I’ll keep them too. Her, you, him, them, us.’”
Bunny sets the glass down. Looks at the pen. The card. The bear.
“That’s three generations in a kitchen summoned by an elbow. That’s legacy. Not the recipe. The motion. Not the card. The hand that wrote it. Not the glitter. The woman who chose it.”
“Jack arrived later.”
Bunny says this the way you say of course. The way you say naturally. The way you say what else would happen.
“But just in time. As he always does. He didn’t walk in. No one summoned him. He was simply there, in the place the story had carved for him. The table was set with memory, meaning, and intention — the full Court, present and past and future, all aligning at once.”
Bunny glances toward the margins of the room, toward the space where things are noted but not said aloud.
“The Seamstress saw it too. She always sees it. She doesn’t walk into a room — she emerges, quiet, inevitable, already halfway through threading a needle of black and silver thread bruised with light. She looked at the moment the way a tailor looks at a hem. Measured it. Judged it with the precision of someone who has seen every story falter in this exact place.”
He shifts in his chair.
“‘The cloth was sagging,’ she said. Weighted too heavily on history’s side. Your father turned boy, you turned daughter, your grandmother answering through gesture, the heirs rooted in breath not memory. A beautiful moment, but uneven.′
She tugged the thread once.
‘The only thing missing was the brother who carries the knife.’
And as the moment demanded, Jack appeared. Not entering, not arriving, but simply there, in the place the story had carved for him.
The Seamstress gave one final satisfied pull.
‘Now,’ she said, returning to her spool. ‘The story won’t tilt.’
And the cloth held.”
Bunny looks at the arm of the chair. Cookie Bear. The pen. The duck card. Three relics. Each one holding a different piece of the same story — the truth, the record, the nourishment. A bear who listened. A pen that sparkled. A recipe that summoned the dead through an elbow.
He reaches for his glass. There’s glitter on it. There’s glitter on the chair. There’s glitter on Cookie Bear that wasn’t there two entries ago. It’s migrating. It’s spreading. It’s doing what it was always designed to do — getting on everything, traveling to places it wasn’t invited, showing up years later in corners you thought you’d cleaned.
“The ink doesn’t leak because it’s broken.”
He holds the pen up to the light. The separated ink shifts inside the barrel, the layers moving like something alive, like something trying to remix itself back into what it used to be.
“It leaks because it remembers. Every splotch on every page of every book I’ve made — that’s not damage. That’s the pen looking for the hand that first held it. The grandmother’s hand. The one that chose glitter. The one that said this matters enough to make it shine so you’d look. So you wouldn’t skip it. So you’d know that someone once stood in a kitchen and decided that a cheesecake recipe deserved to sparkle.”
He sets the pen back down. Next to the bear. Next to the card. The glitter is on his glove again. More of it now. It’s never coming off.
“She had it the whole time. She kept it safe. She put it in the suitcase with the bear and the photograph and all the other things that were too important to leave where someone might take them or use them up or mistake them for ordinary.”
He picks up his drink. The ring on the table is still there. He notices it now. Doesn’t wipe it.
“I thought the glitter was mine. I thought the leaking ink was my grief, my rage, my grudge against whoever stole my pen. I always wondered where the glitter came from. We all did. Turns out the glitter was always hers. It came from a kitchen I never saw, written by a hand I never held, on a card with a duck on it for no good reason except that someone thought ducks belonged on recipe cards and who am I to argue with that.”
He takes a long drink. The ice is mostly gone. The condensation runs down his glove.
“Legacy isn’t what you leave behind. It’s what you make impossible to clean up. It’s the glitter that gets everywhere. It’s the recipe that summons the dead. It’s the elbow your granddaughter moves without knowing she learned it from you. It’s a duck card in a suitcase in a drawer that a rabbit opens on a Tuesday because the Queen is gone and the pen was here the whole time and he doesn’t know what to do with that except hold it and let the ink leak where it wants to.”
He looks at Cookie Bear. The button eyes. The missing mouth. The glitter that doesn’t belong to him, that belongs to a grandmother and a queen and a pen and a duck and a kitchen and a cheesecake and every hand that ever held this pen and chose to make something shine.
He doesn’t make a joke.
He wants to.
He doesn’t.
He sits with one leg thrown over the chair, drink held loosely between the fingertips of his left hand, just by the rim. It looks like it could slip. It won’t.
He stares at the leather case in the corner, tucked rather neatly behind the leg of a huge credenza that has a rather large, heart-shaped copper lock on it. His face is at once bored, determined and resigned. It’s Bunny’s normal posture. Something akin to irritation but not quite. The fingers of his right hand absently drum out a beat “1 & 2 & 3…” stopping at the last beat and then repeat once more before he glances down at his hand slowly, raising one eyebrow and murmuring“terrible habit, that.”
The suitcase in the corner is small and boxy. It’s old, almost ancient looking. Brown leather and worn, with brass clasps like a briefcase and a numbered combination lock—the kind that must match on both sides to open. You get the faint impression it’s humming but it’s not. You’ll swear it almost is.
“You know, everyone always wants to think that all this…” he gestures dramatically with one gloved hand, “…was designed. As if there was a master plan and a blue print.”
Bunny smiles sardonically and half rolls his eyes, still watching the suitcase as if it might move. “A blueprint maybe. But not the kind you think. She didn’t plan it. She carried it. Or… to be more accurate… I did.”
He sets down his glass firmly on the table, a little too firmly, and the cracking sound it makes is not unlike the sound of a snare drum, hit just once and with intention. “Calling it a keepsake box was cute. He always did make the ugly sound more beautiful…” pointing at the chair you’re sitting in. Not at you, at the chair. As if the chair’s former occupant is still occupying space in the room he’s no longer in. “Keepsake Box is such a lovely alternative. Much better than calling it baggage. The weight is the same either way.”
Bunny throws his dangling foot back onto the floor suddenly and stands up. “Let’s begin then, it’s not going to unpack itself and the humming will only get louder.” He says it mostly to himself.
Ungraciously, he drags the case from behind the credenza, giving the credenza a withering look as he does so, careful not to touch it. He doesn’t bother to move the drawer off the table, just places the suitcase on top like he’s stacking evidence. It lands with an unceremonious thud. The case isn’t locked. The clasps look like they used to be shut tightly, as if they once weren’t meant to be opened at all but changed their mind over time and now they don’t quite close right anymore. The combination on each side is already set. 123. Matching on each side. the case pops open with a sigh.
“This isn’t the version of the keepsake box you’ll hear about. Not the one from The Velvet Warpath. It’s not the version you’ll read about in The Pact of Exit. That one is real in the way myth makes something real. This one came before.” Bunny’s fingers hesitate at the lid, looking like it might bruise. Or bruise him back. Then he throws open the lid in one smooth gesture.
“Ah. There it is.” He picks up the book laying right on top. It’s so old it’s missing the back cover, the spine is broken and it’s been taped back together a few times. Some of the pages are dog eared. Some are torn. Not a diary. Not a children’s book. Just an old beat up paperback book that was read so many times it’s falling apart. Bunny doesn’t open it.
“Most children at 10 are reading kids books. Most children at 10 are outside playing. Running. Creating imaginary worlds with friends. She didn’t have children’s books, she didn’t have running. She didn’t have friends. She had this, a hospital bed and nothing but time. She didn’t have other children around to create kingdoms with. So she read about them and constructed them in her mind instead.” He sets the book back in the suitcase, not bothering to show you the title.
“I’ll never quite be sure if she was always able to build in her head that way or if she learned how because she needed to. The end result though…” he glances up at the credenza once more. “…was almost inevitable. She couldn’t unlearn it. ‘Complex and reconstructive visual imagination.’ Nice way of saying she built rooms and filled them because the ones she lived in were empty.”
As he places the book back, you notice a wooden spoon in the case, broken. Old. Chewed. Sharpened on the end. The top of the spoon is large, flat. Flatter than a spoon should be while still calling itself a spoon. On it is written, in all caps and in sharpie, “EMMA’S.” He doesn’t touch it. Bunny’s mouth twists into a bitter smile but there’s a hint of a tear. He’ll deny it though.
“Stupid. Stupid and brilliant actually. She gave him a story about a spoon used as a weapon and he gave her a squirrel and Sir Stabbington. That’s how everything works here. She didn’t ask him to. She never understood what the spoon even was, what it hid. It wasn’t until after, when I took the inventory of what she left behind, that any of us realized why the spoon had to be a weapon.” He stares at it for a very long time.
“That bastard,” he says finally. But he smiles slightly when he says it.
Bunny glances up at the credenza again. And while doing so, something shifts in him. You notice it only slightly but the change is palpable, as if the air in the room became different; as if a mask falls into place. Nodding once and says,“Right then. Some things are better off unsaid. Let’s go. You’ve been sitting too long and this room isn’t for staying. It’s for visiting. I think it’s time to show you the dressing room anyway.” He picks up something from the suitcase, a small ticket stub, and slides it into his pocket as he turns, assuming you’ll follow before he’s even given you time to get up. “Oh. This room? It’s the Ribbon Room. Don’t worry. You can leave your things. Well come back. We always do.”
