The first memory he ever had—the first thing he ever cared about—was the warmth.
Not the warmth of his mother. Not the warmth of his siblings beside him, not the brittle warmth of the straw, not the unreliable warmth of the drafty coop, not the warmth of breath and life in the other animals.
The warmth he longed for was overpowering, the first warmth he felt, the warmth that was lush and green and full, the warmth that could give life or shrivel it up in hours if it pleased. He longed for (though he could not express it) the warmth of the sun on his fur. The simplest warmth. The most fleeting. The last sun of the year.
Blain was a rabbit. Not the runt of his litter, but certainly not the strongest. An average rabbit on the rabbit scale, born just at the end of October with his seven brothers and sisters in a small nest beside the pond on the property of the Harding Farm. He was big enough to catch the eye of Driscol, the barnyard cat, and beautiful enough with his black fur and the one white spot on his forehead to catch the eye of the Harding’s children.
This was a saving grace for all the rabbits and a great loss for Driscol. After much begging, the Harding kids convinced their father to move the whole family, nine entire rabbits, into the chicken coop for the winter.
And so Blain grew with seven siblings, a dozen jaded old hens, and exactly two ducks, one of which was rather out of his mind.
And no sun.
***
“Ho now! Out of the way boy! You impudent fluffball!”
Blain had just enough time to bound out of the way of the flapping wings of the old mallard.
“Please excuse Murdock, he’s up in a frenzy again.”
“Captain! That’s Captain Murdock my sweet.” Keely, Murdock’s mate, with all the tenderness a duck is capable of, preened her love’s feathers back into place. Blain, just a month old and rather unaccustomed to the personalities of his barnyard home, managed to squeak.
“What? What did the child say?”
“He was only apologizing, love.” Keely then turned from Murdock and leaned her bill into Blain’s ear.
“Run home.” Blain did not need to be told twice. Using his already athletic hind legs, he bounded across the dirt floor, far to the back of the coop. With a last leap he sprung into the nest of straw the Harding children had made for his mother and siblings, waking his mother from sleeping as he buried himself in her fur.
“What…what is wrong Blain?” His mother, jet black like himself, yawned and began settling her son’s fur instinctively. “Your brothers bullying you?”
Blain shook his head, flapping his ears around so that his mother had to restart her soothing all over again. As she did so, she watched her son eyeing the ducks. Murdock and Keely had finally made it to their destination, a large tub of water Mr. Harding left for them to swim around in. Keely was having a particularly difficult time getting Murdock into the tub, and not into the trough of seed next to it.
“Oh, hah, oh Murdock? Didn’t I tell you not to get in his way?” his mother scolded without much fervor. “But you do know he’s harmless, don’t you? Dumb duck flew right into a shooting range down the road. Never been quite the same.” Blain made no comment on any of this, and just let his mother’s voice calm him down.
“And why don’t you go play with your siblings? It would pass the winter much faster for you if you’d play with them.” Blain’s brothers and sisters had full reign of the coop, so long as they didn’t try and bother the nesting hens. The coop was large and safe for a brood of young rabbits. Rabbits, being not overly curious animals to begin with, could be quite content with just a den or warren, a much smaller place to explore. In the coop there were the baskets kept piled in a corner, ready to collect eggs. There were always piles of cut wood and metal things from projects and repairs Mr. Harding always meant to complete. There were bags of grain and feed to jump on and roll down, and the duck’s trough to be dared to jump into. Most curious to his siblings was the heater, a squat metal thing which sat in a corner and pumped out dry hot air to keep the coop warm.
Blain especially hated the heater.
And Blain did not play with his siblings because it did not interest him. The memory of that warmth was all that he cared about, and he knew that it was somewhere outside of the coop. He was not born here, he knew that, and all he knew of the outside world was how warm it had been. And just before the ducks had scared him off, he had been waiting beside the coop door for it to open.
Mr. Harding was, if nothing else, a predictable man. He ran his farm on a tight schedule down almost to the minute. Young as he was, even Blain had become accustomed to the farmer’s routine. And it was right before dinner, a time Blain could tell by the light streaming through a window set in the coop’s roof, that Mr. Harding always collected the newly laid eggs.
And, sure enough, just as Blain expected, as he sat there in the nest with his mother fussing over him, Mr. Harding swung open the door and quietly helloed his industrious hens. Blain could see the vast blue sky outside the door.
He tried to scramble out of the nest, but his mother held him back.
“Hold still, I’m not quite done.” He watched as Mr. Harding shooed some of his siblings out of one of the baskets and went about collecting the eggs from the hens. As he did so, the ducks jumped out of their water and quacked around his feet until he threw them some chunks of bread from a loaf Mrs. Harding had probably baked that morning. Mr. Harding collected the last egg as his mother finished setting Blain’s fur in order.
And he bolted.
“Blain!”
He bounded across the coop floor as fast as he could, straight for the open door, straight for the empty fields and sky beyond.
“Whoa now, hold it.” Mr. Harding’s one strong hand caught his hind leg and hoisted him up into the air. Mr. Harding placed him down amongst the eggs and examined to see if he had hurt Blain. “You don’t want to go out there now. It’s winter little rabbit, you’ll freeze to death as young as you are. Cara would be beside herself if that happened.” He shut the coop door and walked Blain over to his mother’s nest, and placed him down. His mother caught a hold of him, her incisors pinching the scruff of his neck with particular ferocity.
“You watch that one now,” Mr. Harding said to Blain’s mother, before turning and walking for the door.
He opened the door and stepped out, and once more, Blain could just briefly see the blue of the sky.
Then the door closed. And the latch locked.
***
Of all the Hardings, Blain’s favorite was Cara, the youngest of the Harding children. All the Hardings, being farm-raised, loved to spend a great deal of their free time from school or chores visiting the animals. It was like they owned a dozen odd pets to entertain themselves with.
Tom, the oldest boy, preferred Sheridan, his father’s unruly horse, over all the farm animals, and would usually only observe the rabbits with a nod and a grunt he thought was identical to his dad’s.
Cindy, the Harding’s oldest daughter, was a cat person, and Driscol relished whenever she visited. She brought him treats, and fresh milk, and defended him against the pestering of the younger boys. She also conveniently distracted Driscol from the rabbits, and by feeding him she unknowingly ensured he would be too full and content to have any interest in eating them for a day or two.
David and John, the twins, preferred Whistler the hunting dog because he, like them, was always bursting with energy and especially liked to run the length of the barnyard back and forth between the two boys as they tossed a baseball back and forth.
But Cara. She loved all the rabbits, their soft fur and skittish ways, but she loved Blain the most. She had found him after all, saw him first, she reminded her siblings daily. Cara would enter the coop, with carrot tops or mint, and feed all the rabbits. But then she would pick up Blain in her small hands, his body growing larger and more difficult to hold in her palms by the day. And she would sit cross-legged on the floor of the coop. And she would bring him into her lap, and hold him against her stomach, wrapping her arms around him. And she would just hold him. Sometimes, she would not even pet him, just hold him. And her warmth, her breath, would seep into him. She would sit like that for hours, late in the winter nights when she should have been studying or back in bed. She loved how still Blain would be, how he would nestle right up against her. She loved how warm he felt.
But even that wasn’t enough for him. It was not warm enough clutched in her arms. It was not.
***
It was warm. He was dreaming.
He dreamed often of this place. Before him was a great expanse of water, many times greater than the water trough in the coop. The wind rippled its surface, and Blain could not see the other side of it. He was in amongst the reeds at the edge of the water, and the arching fronds of tall grass in the field behind him curled over his head.
And over all was the sun.
His ears pricked up as the grass behind him brushed and rustled.
He opened his eyes. The light of the moon through the window illuminated Driscol’s open mouth reaching for him in the nest. He could not move or make a sound out of fear.
“CAT!” The stillness of the night broke with the dog’s bark as he barreled into Driscol, who spat and hissed and flailed his claws. Whistler got his jaws around Driscol’s tail and swung him around and through the air. The coop was in absolute panic, the ducks had flown up to the rafters, the chickens were all cackling and fluttering feathers, and Blain’s mother and siblings had fled to a safe corner of the coop behind the heater. But Blain stayed rooted into the nest.
Whistler released Driscol and the cat somersaulted through the air to land ready to fight on his feet. His hiss choked short in pain.
“My tail, you broke my tail!” Driscol’s tail indeed no longer swished and curled but bent at an odd angle and hung limp on the dusty floor. Whistler, whose muzzle was covered in deep red scratches, did not care.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
“I’m hungry Whistler! Starving. I just wanted one rabbit, one warm rabbit.”
“We’re all hungry Driscol, you know it’s that time of year. You have the food in your bowl, and you could have as much good warm food from the table just like me.”
“I wouldn’t beg like you do, dog.” From the nest, Blain could see how both Driscol and Whistler had gotten in. The door to the coop was open, the latch probably never put in place by one of the Harding children when they last left. Outside, the world was dark. Blain could barely see more than a few tufts of grass just outside the coop.
But the door was open. The outside was open. And somewhere out there—
“Blain, for the sake of the stars and mysel—.” His mother’s oath cut short as she grabbed the scruff of his neck, dragged him out of the nest, and stuffed him into the cramped space behind the heater amongst his siblings. The warmth here suffocated him, and he could only barely hear the dog and cat over the hum of the machine.
“Driscol, you get out of the coop before you make any more trouble.”
“There’s only trouble now because of you howling and barking like the lumbering idiot you are. I can already hear that old man awake and clomping around his den. I just wanted one damn rabbit.”
“And didn’t you think about the young ones? What about the one that likes that rabbit?”
“What about the one that likes me? Look at my ruined tail.”
“Oh, come off of it Driscol. I’m sure your tail will be fine.” Blain heard the door creaking open wider. Driscol skittered across the floor towards the door, then Blain heard the soft thud of his paws on the earth as he ran away into the night.
“What in the hell…Whistler, you get outta here.” Mr. Harding was there. “Leave this door open one night and pandemonium breaks out.”
Blain heard Whistler plod across the coop to his master.
“Don’t you look at me like that. You know you’re in trouble. The cat is too.”
Whistler whimpered.
“Not that much trouble Whistler. Just get back in the house.”
The door closed. The latch locked.
***
The odd bend in Driscol’s tail remained with him the rest of his life, though only the Hardings would know this after whisking him away to see the town vet. After that one shocking night, life resumed as normal in the coop. The winter was not yet over.
But Blain had a new purpose. His days were just as mundane. He spent them avoiding the ducks and chickens who grew more and more cross the longer the winter lasted. He spent them avoiding his sibling’s games, which interested him less and less. He knew now how he could get out, to the outside, the outside where he remembered the warmth and the sun.
His plan however involved waiting for another night where one of the Harding’s left open the coop door. He first passed entire nights wide awake as his brothers and sisters and mother slept, staring at the door. He soon realized that the door would not open by itself in the night, and once his mother noticed he was sleeping during the day she got suspicious. So, he slept again, and played with his brothers and sisters by day so she would not worry. When they didn’t want to play, he would sit in the light cast by the coop window for hours, moving slowly as it moved across the floor. But the weak filtered warmth it produced was no more satisfying than the overpowering warmth from the heater. Besides that, he had to move every time Murdock crossed from one end of the coop to the other in a fit, which was often.
But each evening, he watched carefully the last Harding who left the coop, and he listened for the latch to lock the door.
And one day, it did not lock.
He could not believe his good fortune. He stayed up that night, holding his eyes shut tight until he was sure every animal in the coop was asleep. Then he crawled out of the nest and hopped as lightly as he could to the door. It was then he realized he could still not open it himself. He sat there, contemplating the great wooden wall.
Finally, he hopped to the heater, unwilling to give up and go back into the nest but beginning to shiver in the big empty coop. And still he watched the door. He could hear outside the wind blowing around the coop. Maybe the wind, if he just waited for the wind…
The creak of the door woke him up. He jumped up in fright, thinking he had missed his chance. But it was still night. The other animals were asleep. His mother’s soft snoring told him even she had not noticed his absence.
And the door had blown in, just a crack. Just a tiny sliver of inky darkness separated the door from the frame. He did not hesitate.
With a bound he crossed the floor, and struck the gap, forcing his tiny body through, feeling the rough wood catch at his fur.
And then he was out, and with one more bound, he was drowning, drowning in vast whiteness. He had jumped straight into a snowbank. Outside, flakes were still falling, the cruel sort of snow that comes at the beginning of March. He tried to get his bearings and righted himself so that there was blackness above and whiteness below and himself in between. And he gathered his legs underneath him, and took another leap, and drowned, drowned again, the powdery snow coating his fur and caving in over top of him.
And now he felt it. The cold. He had felt the cold before, but not like this. He had never felt the needle pricks of snow and ice melting into his fur. It had never been so cold that he could not think. He tried to leap again, further from the doorway. This was not right. None of it was right. The warmth was here, somewhere, it had been. It was there when he was just a baby, before the Hardings took him to the coop. He would find it. More snow piled atop him, the flakes falling slowly but steadily. There was less and less blackness, more and more vast engulfing whiteness around him, rising up over his head.
He could not jump again. His legs would not move. The snow piled more, more, until it was all around him. He shivered, and shivered, and shivered, until…he began to shiver less. He fidgeted around, but the snow was packed around him, melted by what little warmth he had had and then frozen again hard. The sound of the wind was muted and muffled overhead.
And he felt…sleepy. And warm. The warmth called out to him, called out through his fur and skin straight to his bones. It was not the warmth of the direct warmth of the sun and the new season, but a whispering warmth, a final warmth. It hummed, like the wind above him. If he could have run to it, he would have. But he did not. But the warmth, that dark warmth, that numb warmth, came to him anyways.
***
“Pass the mashed potatoes Tom.” Dishes clinked over the Harding’s dinner table as Tom bumped into the gravy dish en route to his father’s hand. Mr. Harding sighed deeply.
“Mrs. Harding, I’m afraid we’ve just added another tablecloth to your washing.”
“Mr. Harding, I’m afraid we have.”
“Sorry Mom. Sorry Dad.” The fireplace crackled in the living room, and as per Mrs. Harding’s wishes, they had turned off the fluorescent lights of the kitchen in favor of a few brand-new oversized candles. They gave quite the homey feeling to everything during the winter and allowed just enough shadow for the boys to secretly feed the dog scraps under the table. This was made especially easier because their sisters were not at dinner but were out helping decorate the school gymnasium for the Spring Carnival.
“Well, what’s one more thing to wash? I told myself I wanted everything neat and tidy for Easter anyways.”
“Um…then um…Mom I uh…” one of the twins began to mumble.
“Spit it out David,” their father commanded.
“WellJohnandIweredownatSheridan’sstableandweweremessingaroundandIslippedandithadjustrainedandIwaswearingmyfavoritejackettheonewiththealienonnthebackand—.”
“Of course you did. Just leave it in the washroom sweetie.”
The family ate in silence again. David regretted handing Whistler a bone under the table just a moment before because he was chewing on it just a little too loudly.
“Oh, I do have some bad news. Cara’s favorite rabbit died,” Mr. Harding said to fill the silence.
“Oh. Oh dear.” Mrs. Harding placed her silverware down with the utmost care. The boys continued eating. “The one with the white spot on his head?”
Mr. Harding nodded. Mrs. Harding brought one hand up to her mouth.
“Oh she’ll just be crushed when she gets home.”
Mr. Harding nodded as he shoveled in another spoonful of potatoes.
“I know. It must have been because someone left the door open last night. Not that I don’t give reminders about latching the door every single day.” All three boys avoided their father’s gaze.
“Somehow,” he continued, “the rabbit got out last night into that last snow. Froze to death. He’s so small, it probably happened too fast for the mother to come get him.” Below the table, Whistler had stopped gnawing on his bone and laid his head between his paws.
“I buried him down by the pond,” Mr. Harding continued, “where we found them. Seemed appropriate. I’m sure Cara would have wanted him buried.”
“We are going to tell Cara, aren’t we?” Mrs. Harding asked, a sort of gentle push for her husband.
“Of course, Nancy. I was going to walk down to the pond with her to show her when the weather got warm.”
Outside the house, it was still cold, and would be for a little while longer. Driscol, with his broken tail, was stretched out on the porch in the twilight, his winter fur ruffled in the breeze. Sheridan, out cropping grass in his field, shifted his weight around to keep his blanket thrown across his body. And down by the pond, the wind blew through a gap in the reeds and out across the water.
–
Justin Morgan Burkett is a native of Lancaster, Pennsylvania. A trained archaeologist and historian, his passion lies in storytelling inspired both by the history and nature he grew up surrounded by. His sharp and lucid writing style focuses on modern imagings of folklore and ghost stories, gentle sendups of rural America, and what it means to come of age during the rapid transition from the analogue to the digital and then to the A.I. world of the new millenia, all told through the distinct voices of his characters. When not digging or researching, he can be found on the front porch of his home in Willow Street, writing in old journals or playing new guitars.
© 2023, Justin Morgan Burkett
Halfway Down the Stairs 