“Alone with Rabbit”

Every morning gray gulls circled the steeple of the church across the street. They swooped, crying, into the bell tower, dove deeply across the doorway, finally rose in a discordant chorus to the ridgepole and settled there in time to ignore the attendants of morning mass. Maple heard the gulls and mistook them for her brothers in her sleep, Their sound caused her to dream of home. She dreamed she was the water. She saw the gulls, not in their staggered line on the ridgepole, but as a floating flock on her surface, fishing her, rising and settling on her innumerable waves. Then she would wake, get out of bed and put the kettle on as the neighbor’s hound dog began to bellow.

Meanwhile, Rabbit would come in under the fence, her paws scrabbling the smooth dirt in the shallow hole. When she was through, her big ears stood straight and she shook her bristling fur. 

“Good morning,” Maple would say as she moved from the stove and opened the back door for the dog. After that, there wasn’t much more to say most days.