THE HARE AND THE MOON

There is a hare in the forest who knows the ways of the universe better than most. She knows that the full moon is for guts-spilling, that life moves on a fickle tide, that stars are for wishing on, that where trees shed their leaves they stretch their roots too, that rain does not clean flesh as well as humans would like it to, that The Cold gets into all bones eventually – but that chill need not mean death.

The hare is wild and wise enough, though, not to think about these things too often: she knows to handle them sparingly and let the moon’s blue pull do the rest. That way the moon, too, has her space: her horizons to to-and-fro against. See, interrupted, she’ll unspool her pride – thick and resolute, protective over her great revolution of twenty-eight – and bite. Only some have remembered how to use her tick-tick time as a device of their own: astrologers, pilgrims, menstruators...

In the undergrowth, the hare prepares for winter, searching out softnesses and supplies, mapping their locations for those quiet months when she’ll need them most – a feathered den where her belly can digest her kills, before slow sleep settles. And the Earth expects this ebb of her. When her front paws press hardest into the soil, cold weather is surely coming. Or else her heart is sore and she needs to nurse the ache. Either way, the tide will always turn again – never final, never still.

Aileen McKay