Skid

Snowy Prairie Rabbit

Snowy Prairie Rabbit Mary Ruefle was born in Missouri parenthetical to all entreaty. Through no fault of her own, she has traveled widely from aspergillum swap meet to swap meet, teaching at Vermont College, Bellingham University and currently in some Ohio state. Even a brief study shows the snowy rabbit’s life far more regimented than we would ever suppose. Rue: an aromatic plant yielding a volatile oil formally used medicinally. During her baby tornado years when most people can’t get out of the way of their own capes, Mary invented lassitudinous head-wounds that still influence hat-making abroad. In the event of a water landing, your seat becomes a flotation device—that was Mary’s idea. Ditto the preheat function. Rue: to feel remorse or sorrow, to regret and repent. When the Gauls came upon us in the ’70s, after a disgraceful resistance marked by gratuitous sleeping pills devoid of actual sleeping, it was Mary who, watching from her tub of milk, penned the anthems we most wish to sing but never do that nonetheless synchronize all our duskier cries. When I first met Mary, she was having serious barbecuing problems. All the corpuscles were breaking 31 and you know those things you sometime see in the road: apparitions of floating lakes, mirages of big rocks, beady-eyed hallucinations? Well, I’d been driving right over them for years doing what to myself I dare not ask. But enough of me. Once there was a little girl who couldn’t stop hopping and squinching up her nose so they sent her to a doctor who prescribed injections for the little girl who couldn’t stop pretending she was a rabbit because otherwise she’d become a rabbit, the annals are full of such cases, and think how sad her family would be feeding her only turnip greens, keeping her outside even in winter, how the dog, even in friendliness, might rip her legs off. We are very lucky tonight. 32 ...