Moon Rabbit

Mother first told me the myth of the rabbit on the moon when I was still small enough to listen. How when the moon goddess, dressed in rags, begged the rabbit for food, it twitched, then threw its body into the fire at her feet. The goddess, grateful, drew the rabbit’s silhouette into the night sky. Beautiful, silver, like neither of them had been.

Then Mother was gone. When I tapped a finger on her bedroom door, I heard no answer, only the licking of the air conditioner down the hall. “Mother?” I called. Nothing.

I combed through our apartment. Poked my head into the clutter of the bathroom, the overfull pantry, even the clammy dark of the laundry room, where I used to look for ghosts. The front door was locked, keys hooked by the handle. I pressed my ear back against Mother’s door. A snuffling sound, the half-breath of a secret, leaked through.

I tightened a hand around the cool steel knob. Turned it. There, in the divot between two pillows, was a small, wooly mass, freckled black-and-white and shivering. I unfurled my palm. “Mother?” Though, I didn’t need to say anything at all. I knew the rabbit was my mother from its black eyes, its sharp, square teeth.

A better daughter would have counted the signs. The burner under the kettle, left on after brewing tea. The handset laid crooked on its base. But I was small. I had my own asterisms. I saw my mother like I saw the sky: somehow distant, not quite real.

The last time the landline rang, my mother learned her mother was dead. By then, we had stopped speaking. From my bedroom I heard her shriek, her voice a stranger’s, shrill as a blade. Her slender knees crumpling to the floor.

So Mother had long fallen ill. In the haze of it I must have missed the corners of her front teeth sharpening, her body gnawing itself into a new shape. I inched closer, no sudden movements, careful not to breathe. When my fingertips grazed the crown of her head, her eyes blinked slowly closed. Lemony light from the window fractured across her fur.

Late in the day I dug up dandelions from the cracks, spiderwebbing the sidewalk. It was winter, just past lunar new year, the ground glazed with frost. Everything looked silver, even me. When I returned, Mother had knocked over the handset, her paws pressed against the dull buzz. My mouth opened as she turned to look at me, then closed. Head full of static. I wanted to hold her but couldn’t imagine it. My mother, so small. Instead, I held the bouquet of greens to her mouth. Between her incisors, their frozen stems snapped like bones.

February slush melted into green shoots. I began to find clumps of fur strewn around our apartment. I didn’t know rabbits shed in such large tufts, mottled like spilled ink. I collected them in a small felt pouch I wound around my wrist, hidden in the same lonely corners. In the yellow glow of the living room, I brushed Mother’s thinning coat, the splotches of raw pink skin beneath.

I slept in her bedroom that night. In dreams, I was kinder to her and still had to watch patches of fur disintegrate beneath my touch. When I shook awake, I couldn’t remember her face. Only her shadow, swelling. Her glinting eyes, two black moons.

Once, years ago, when Mother retold me the myth, I wept. I buried my black nest of hair deep in her chest and pleaded with her to change it. Where was the version of the story where the rabbit didn’t convulse dead? Where the goddess didn’t ask?

Mother brushed her fingers over my scalp, untangling as she went. “Rabbits are lucky,” she said. “Don’t cry. This one was blessed to live forever.” In the dimming light, her round face looked cratered.

Last night, I held my mother for the last time. Like we might still learn to speak through hair and skin and bone. I constellated her features: her body before it was wispy and frail, before she eclipsed herself, when we might have been better to one another. I thought we’d never been so beautiful, in the dark.