The Magic Rabbit Gets a Name

 

The girl whispered her secret to the small rabbit. This happened on a hot summer night in a city called Baltimore.

Actually, why bother to call it a “hot summer night in Baltimore?” On any summer night in Baltimore even glasses of ice water will sweat.

Anyway!

The girl hid with the rabbit from her parents under a deck behind her family’s house, amid the spiders and slugs, a cool spot where usually only the big dog went to lie in the dirt and shade. The dog was here now, panting and bumping the girl as he tried to chomp the small rabbit, who trembled.

“Charlie, no,” said the girl. She waved him away. He panted. His breath was like a wet wind. The girl pushed the dog, but the dog reached toward the rabbit with his black dry paw that was as big as the girl’s head. The girl – we will call her E – gave the dog one more stout shove, and he left, because he also wanted to poop, and his poops were so mighty he liked to spread them around the yard.

(“E” because: Excellent, Eclectic, Elfish, Epic!)

E turned back to the trembling rabbit that she held in her palm, and she rubbed her thumb down its nose. She and the rabbit had been friends long enough that she knew how to make the rabbit relax. Thumb, nose; thumb, nose. Soon, the rabbit sighed, a deep whistle, and with one last great shudder, stopped trembling.

You are now saying to yourself, this is no ordinary rabbit. Ordinary rabbits are big enough for a dog to eat, but this one was in E’s palm?

Yes. This rabbit was tiny, small enough to fit in a pants pocket. It had wide-set all-black eyes, and it wore an orange-and-white plaid smock with red buttons.

A smock? you ask. Was it a girl rabbit?

Who knows? It doesn’t matter. What matters is that E told the rabbit her secret.

“Here is the secret,” she whispered, and the rabbit’s ears stiffened. “You must go to Poland, and you will be gone a long, long time. But you must make Sheri and Michael come back home again. You must promise you will make them come back home.”

The rabbit nodded.

“Promise,” said the girl.
         The rabbit said, Promise.

“They tell me they will come back, but I don’t believe them. So you must make them. Because I love them. Even though they are leaving. Jerkfaces.”

Promise, said the rabbit. Though: the rabbit didn’t know what Poland was, and if it was a place, as the rabbit imagined it must be, the rabbit didn’t know where Poland could be. Perhaps near the candy store? Or the ballet studio? It couldn’t be as far as the beach, where sometimes E and her family spent their time.

“Poland is farther than the beach,” E said. “You’ll have to go with them across the ocean.”

The rabbit said “…”

“On an airplane.”

“…!”

The Jerkfaces lived next door, in the house at No. 65_1. She'd known them her whole life, and she loved them like she loved her real grandparents. Except she didn’t have real grandparents anymore, which made her sad sometimes. E’s mother told her that now and then life gives us a big glass of sad to drink before bed, but we’re often happier in the morning.

Maybe. But E had swallowed enough glasses of sad in her young life, and she thought it tasted like dog pee. She wanted milkshakes before bed.

(E just told us that she would like it to be known that doesn't drink dog pee and doesn't know what dog pee tastes like. For the record)

So, these two who lived next door were like her grandparents. She called them “Neighborhood Grandparents,” but now they were going away. They’d sold their house at No. 65_1 and said they were off to live for almost a year in a country named Poland.

“But we’re coming back,” they said. “We’ll just live in a different neighborhood when we return.”

She didn’t believe them. Tears, tears, and a sloppy mouth full of sad. She said, “You aren’t coming back!”

They said, “We are!”

And she said, “You aren’t!”

So now she handed them the rabbit, who knew her secret and who had promised.

“Of course we'll take the rabbit to Poland!” said Neighborhood Grandpa, who had not much hair and a habit of being silly.

“If the rabbit trembles, rub its nose,” said E.

“What is the rabbit called?” asked Neighborhood Grandma, who was good at growing plants and giving hugs.

The girl thought about it. She thought that Sheri and Michael could be squashed together, so she gave the rabbit the name Sherichael. But she spelled it Shericle, like popsicle.

Coffee break at a German airport

But that name didn't stick, either, because in Poland the alphabet works and sounds differently than it does in Baltimore. When the rabbit landed with Sheri and Michael at the airport in Poland, the border guard let them past, then stopped the rabbit called Shericle. "Hey, wait," said the guard. “You can't just hop right into our country. Don't you have an identity card?”

“...”

"How about a name?"

The rabbit, who had just flown across a whole ocean and hadn’t slept much, now trembled, because Sheri and Michael had already retrieved their luggage and were heading for the airport doors. The rabbit couldn't lose them now. Not after a promise! So, the rabbit whispered the name, “Shericle.”

The border guard asked the rabbit to speak the name again.

The rabbit did, and the border guard wrote it down, then handed the rabbit a card.

“Your identity paper,” he said. “Witamy w Polsce. Welcome to Poland, a land of dragons and castles and poets and scientists! Also rabbits.”

The rabbit hurry-hopped past the gate and the luggage carousel and out the door, and it wasn’t until Sheri and Michael and the rabbit had found their way to their new apartment that the rabbit looked at the identity paper.

“SZERYKL,” it read.

Szerykl! That must be how the border guard heard the name in English, then turned it into Polish! Well, why not? It was a made-up name anyway. And the rabbit now lived a long way from Baltimore. So, if a new country, and a new life, why not a new name? Why not Szerykl?

After all, what mattered was to keep watch over Sheri and Michael, and who knows what sort of trouble two Neighborhood Grandparents could find in a land of dragons and castles and poets and scientists?