The best bit is the bit that used to scare her. Once the skin has been removed, the rabbit lies on the table without its bunny suit on. It can be anything it wants. Clary strokes the cool fur. The bench is covered in wire and wood wool. The pieces are all laid out. Her father stares at the clay skull with a finger on his chin, ready to put the rabbit back together again. Clary watches him, recalling when there weren’t any rabbits, only jackalopes popping up like magic. He’d cover each with a box until it was perfect. Then she’d lift the cardboard. There it was. The jackalope. Antlers, ears, rabbity whiskers almost twitching on her fingers. It looked like it was about to hop off, and got frozen with the horizon in its eyes.
The window lets in a strip of air thin as memory. Clary pours coffee. One for him. One for her: half milk, half coffee, one sugar per foot she has grown in the last few years. The footsteps on the walkway are curt. Each rap on the door is perfectly spaced, like someone learned at college how to knock right, what every knock means. Clary answers the door, nudging the dent on the frame with her hip. The man’s shirt is cornflower. He rolls up his sleeves without looking, just rolling, rolling his way through the day. He looks at Clary, adjusts his silky tie and fails to adjust what to say. Whether the girl is tall, wearing tight yellow shorts and has a fake tattoo of a chipmunk on her wrist, or not, he asks, ‘Is your mommy or daddy home?’ He frowns at the magic marker painting her toes black. She shows him in by simply stepping back. Her father doesn’t stand.
‘Mr Harris? Cale Harris?’ the man says, extending his hand. It hangs.
Cale Harris continues working. He tucks the rabbit mould into the skin and rolls over the fur like zipping up a sleeping bag. The man wraps his handshake around his folder full of forms.
‘I’m here from Moss and Sons. We wrote to you recently regarding an offer on your land. I’m not sure if you received our letter…’
‘We got it,’ Cale says. ‘Then we got it again.’
Clary flops onto the foamy seating area of the trailer, one leg dangling, one foot on the ground. She watches the shirt guy look around for something to butter up her father like toast. ‘Nice place you have here, really cosy…’ Something. He looks at the girl, then back at the dead rabbit.
‘Then, you’ll know we’ve made you a very generous offer on your land,’ shirt guy says.
‘I know,’ says Cale.
‘We understand drainage is poor and it would take considerable resources to correct. You haven’t built on it?’
‘Nope.’
‘And nor did your father?’
Here it comes again, the offer, the argument. Clary clinks through the jar of glass eyes on the coffee table and lies back, balancing fox eyes on her eyelids. The glass is cold. The jar mists under her fingertips. She balances the eyes on her face, then replaces them with the deer eyes so much bigger than her own. On her back, she pictures living in a supermarket, the trailer smack bang in the middle of the hot-sauce aisle. Shoppers mentally scrape past with shopping carts and peer through the windows to see what’s on offer: just a girl and her dad watching Shark Tank every night.
Clary removes the deer eyes from her eyelids and gazes into their amber mirrors in her hands. Deer eyes would be cool.
Coffee freckles the papers under the jar, a grain here, a grain there, sprinkled each day. There are more papers somewhere, buried in the forest of the trailer. Clary’s surrounded. There’s a deer in the bathroom, a crow perches on the closet about to swoop onto bits of cotton wool on the carpet like carrion. Glass eyes watch Clary eat, sleep and pick her nose all day. The hunting store in town used to buy the animals, the museum too. Since the store closed and the museum got computers, business isn’t what it was. Clary feels the animals are breeding, crowding in. Yet still her father can’t pass anything on a roadside without stopping and wondering if he can make it work.
‘Good find today,’ he says, swinging a dead raccoon through the door by the tail.
Clary sighs, stroking the rabbit squatted by the kettle, the nook of fur between its ears. Not an antler in sight. There hasn’t been a jackalope in years.
There were rules about jackalopes, Clary’s father explained. It was Mom’s job to hunt them. You could only hunt at night. Jackalopes were skittish, wily and rare as turkey’s teeth.
‘Is that why I’ve never seen one hopping around?’ Clary used to ask, yawning as he made up her bed. ‘Is that where Mom goes all the time?’
Her father placed a finger on his nose: ‘Bingo.’ He sniffed. The air lingered, clouded with perfume. He stared at the dust framing the absence of a bottle on the shelf, swiped his eyes with the back of his hand and tucked Clary in.
‘Let me tell you about jackalopes,’ he said. ‘On a full moon, you might see one, if you’re lucky. You have to be really something to catch them. You have to cover up your scent so they don’t sniff you coming. And you have to set a whisky trap so they’re easier to catch. Then, you wait. Sometimes you have to wait a long time.’
Clary paints her toenails blue with a bottle of varnish she found on top of the mailbox. The light outside is fading. The sun slots down between the silver trailers like a coin in a machine. Clary’s stomach rumbles, followed by her father’s. One, then the other, they rumble like drums going to war. It’s time.
‘You ready?’ Cale asks.
Clary scrapes her hair into a cap and grabs her sneakers. The insides stick to her wet toes. They look both ways behind the Megamarket. Cale opens the dumpster.
‘One. Two. Three. Umphh.’
He hoists Clary onto his shoulders like a kid at the circus. She dangles into the trash, diving for boxes and glistening Saran Wrap. She claws, tossing packets onto the asphalt. Meat wrapped in slick plastic. Bananas, potatoes, and eggs she must hold carefully while scrambling down.
‘Hell yeah,’ Cale says, tossing sell-by dates into a duffel bag. ‘Why do they need another market? The one they’ve got don’t even sell all they have.’
In the trailer’s kitchen, everything is more than it looks. The dining table folds down into a bed. The drawer of one cupboard can become a counter; the door of another is secretly an ironing board. And trash can be dinner, and dinner can be victory just like that. Clary puts the eggs in water and watches some sink to the bottom, and some waver, deciding whether to bounce.
‘Good eggs,’ Cale says. ‘Perfectly fine steak. Past its best my…’
The room sizzles, smoke off the hotplate hisses into her ears faster than rumours. Clary chews her food slow as a thought. Her father wolfs down the meat, clearing the plate to the dots under the glaze.
‘Tastes like fu… f… fudge you, Mr Megamarket,’ he says. ‘Oops, sorry pumpkin, not a word you should hear. Don’t be cussing at school, pay attention, you don’t wanna end up like me.’
Clary laughs, she can’t help it. He slips into talking to her like she’s six a zillion times a day. His mouth is full of fudge, fluff, sugars and shoots, every word tamed so it won’t bite her ears. Yet he’s forever apologising, sorry for what he’s thinking, rather than what he lets himself say. Clary remembers him arguing with a neighbour when she was small. He reddened like Christmas and clenched his fists.
‘You, you…’ he said. He spotted her beside him, a child fingering a flower into the dirt. Only muddyfunster would come out of his mouth. The neighbour laughed in his face.
‘Let’s go,’ he’d said.
There were holes under her armpits to sew for school. The cotton blouse in his hands looked slippier to get to grips with than the squirrel he was fixing on the bench. Clary saw him measure every squirrelly inch. Her spine tingled, afraid, as the squirrel got lost, then became itself again. Cale stitched her blouse to the leg of his jeans and said fuck – ‘Sorry pumpkin, not a word you should use. Ok?’ he said. The girl nodded. She has always understood some words are wood wool, stuffed into gaps to fill holes, and others are flesh, stomachs and hearts. They must be removed.
The trailer is hazed with burnt fat. Clary’s father steps out for a cigarette. He looks out to the field. The lights of the trailers are scattered white as litter. Clary flicks nail varnish off her fingers and watches her father consider his land. And again, she pictures the market, right here, a Buy One, Get One Free sign above his head. She follows him across the long grass with the petition in her hand, water seeping into her sneakers that blow bubbles at the marsh.
‘They can’t take away people’s homes,’ Cale says.
Clary isn’t sure. There are fewer trailers than this time last year. Her toes nudge empty cans, Wild Turkey bottles, tread softly around diapers dumped on the grass. It looks less like home than like a pullout on the way.
Outside the steel trailer, a man and a woman sit on deckchairs, sticks loaded with sausages pointing at a fire.
‘How you doing?’ says Cale, holding his pen. ‘I’m putting together another petition. They can’t do nothing if we all stand together.’
The woman glances at her husband. Her husband inspects his sneakers. Cale’s pen glints in the firelight. The metal trailer is a flickering mirror of them all.
‘That guy was over here today,’ the woman says.
‘Oh yeah?’ says Cale.
‘Promised to relocate us, all of us, to that new park outside of town. Hear they have a hot tub, communal laundry, the works.’
The paper crumples in Cale’s hand. He turns away, tossing, ‘Enjoy your ba–… basket sausages,’ over his shoulder.
‘Come on, Cale! No need to be that way,’ the man says. ‘Sit, take a load off. Have a beer. Come on! It ain’t a bad offer, you could do worse.’
‘They just gonna do it anyway,’ the woman yells after him.
The words bounce off Cale’s back. He walks. Clary does a foxtrot to keep up.
‘We could knock on other doors,’ she says, one foot on the porch, one inside home. She will go inside if he says, or she will grab the pen and hammer on every door for twenty miles.
‘Guess people like hot tubs more than loyalty,’ her father says.
Clary knows what he’s thinking as he sits on the steps outside. He looks out at the lights over the highway like a poor man’s Vegas. His head is full of the help he has given his neighbours, the handout to Mrs Jones when her husband stepped out, Clary’s old clothes donated to the Stephensons and their expanding tribe of blonde girls. He can give them cold morning tow-starts till hell freezes over, but they can’t give him a signature – won’t. He has said these things a hundred times, but tonight, he says nothing. Clary sits beside him, fresh out of what to say. His silence sticks to her thick as the night air. She wishes he would talk. He doesn’t even mention the jackalope trail.
The first time a letter came, Cale paced round the trailer. The paper in his fist was fuel on a fire.
‘What’s it say?’ Clary asked.
‘Don’t worry, pumpkin, someone just wants to buy our land. It won’t happen. I won’t let it,’ he said.
‘Where will the jackalopes live?’ she said.
That was it. She was a genius, he said. He knew how to make folk sign his petition. He picked up a pen, handed Clary a pad of paper and sat beside her as she wrote the letter.
Deer Everyone,
My name is Clary and I am six years old. I live with my father on a jackalope reserve. Most people don’t know it, but jackalopes are rabbits with antlers and they are very VERY rare. Pleese don’t take away their home.
Clary’s printed letter was sticky-taped to the door. The letters were pouring in, Cale said. Some woman who thought his daughter sounded adorable wanted to sign his petition, so did some guy who hated stores, and someone who had chained herself to diggers seven times. One even arrived from a magazine called Mysteries. They wanted to take photos of Clary and Cale wearing deerstalkers on their ‘jackalope reserve’. People were on their side, Cale said. Weird people, but people nonetheless.
‘Maybe I should start a jackalope trail,’ he laughed, after the photographer left. ‘People want to believe in all sorts of sh–… sherbet.’
He photocopied flyers and left them in the hunting store. Two college kids with skinny cigarettes stopped by.
The padlock glares on the dumpster now. Clary and her father stand in the alley like people in a restaurant presented with a dish they don’t know how to eat.
‘Who locks their trash?’ Cale asks.
The air nips Clary’s hands. Winter is around the corner, watching their every move with its silvery eye. Her yellow shorts are stuffed in a bag above the water heater. She has dragged out the coat that makes her arms look like Frankenstein.
‘What now?’ she says.
Cale rakes through his pockets: lighter, keys and loose change. Not enough for a dog or a slice, not enough to be able to say ‘shoot’ and go home.
‘There’s other markets,’ he says. ‘There always is.’
They trail along the highway, cars whipping by. Thirteen-year-old girls lean out the window of a pink limousine and cheer. Clary looks straight ahead at the lights of the Saver store like a beacon. Behind it, the dumpster is open. Pickings are slim. No meat, just eggs, avocados and dill pickles. It will do.
Clary mashes avocado and slices dills into a bowl. The omelette is good. They splash an island of hot sauce next to a swamp of avocado on the plate.
‘What’s this one called?’ her father says.
Clary thinks. It’s her job to name every dish, on days when their haul isn’t amazing. The omelette is sandy-coloured and frazzled at the edges. The makeshift guacamole looks like something squished.
‘The great Mexican frog rebellion,’ she says, dipping egg into green and red.
He has to laugh, wherever he can.
Clary washes the plates. Her father looks an army of stuffed mice in the eye. They stand on the table, some on their tiptoes, some looking down. He groups a few together as if they are friends, angling them just right.
‘What do you think?’ he says.
Clary looks at the scene. The choir of mice have red jackets and scarves looped around their necks. One wears wire spectacles. One is holding a scrap of paper with squiggles on, all have open mouths like they are ready to sing a mouse song.
‘They need something,’ Clary says. ‘A wool hat with a pompom on top, something like that?’
Cale shrouds two mice wielding polystyrene snowballs in tissue. He sighs, picking up a fat mouse in an apron, positioning the doll’s bowl and spoon in her paws.
‘Humiliating,’ he says, placing it in a box.
Clary stacks the little boxes inside a bigger box by the door and thinks about the black boxes outside. Humane traps, they’re called. The floors are sticky with glue. Once anything is inside it can’t get out.
It’s early when Cale loads the pick-up. There is nothing in the flat back that looks ready to swoop, bite or run for its life, just mice, messed about with, given people-like poses. He covers the boxes with a tarp and Clary hops in. The radio crackles to another station as they drive into the next town.
‘Adorable,’ the store owner says. ‘We can take more in a few weeks.’
She sits behind the counter, tucking instructions into plastic packets of worry dolls. Cale stares at the stick people, legs and arms bound with colourful string. Little squares of paper litter the counter. Place a worry doll under your pillow each night, tell her your problems and when you wake they’ll have disappeared.
The shop owner looks at Cale and leans forward with worry dolls in her hand.
‘You want some?’ she says.
Cale steps back, the way he does when women are too nice and smile for no reason. He looks around for Clary. She is wandering around the store inspecting displays of kitchen whisks shaped like rabbit ears, lamps shaped like bears, candles that look like fancy slices of cake. Everything is shaped like something it isn’t. Cale shakes his head at the worry dolls in the shopkeeper’s hand.
‘So you’re making another order?’ he asks.
‘Sure,’ the woman says, stroking a mouse ear with her fingertip. ‘Can you do some mice on bicycles?’
‘Where the fu–… flip am I going to get a little mouse bicycle?’
‘I think it’s called a micycle, Dad,’ Clary says, standing behind him.
The woman laughs. ‘I don’t know. Maybe a skateboard? Or a skiing mouse then?’
Clary pictures another trip to the doll store, a mouse in her father’s pocket, everything held close for size. He puts his hands in his flannel pockets and walks to the door without looking back. The woman watches him go, stroking her ponytail like a pet. Outside, two teenage girls approach the store saying, ‘We got to go in here! This store has some cool weird crap.’
‘That’s a weird fucking store,’ Clary says. ‘Who spends all their money on candles that look like cakes? They all melt the same.’
‘Damned if I know what people spend their money on, pumpkin,’ Cale says. ‘Damn, pumpkin, what have I told you about cussing?’
Clary grins, pretty sure she’ll be a pumpkin her whole fucking life.
The mice on the table are no longer carollers. One sniffs a flower, two hold paws. Clary fiddles with a mouse with nothing in its paws. Ideally, it would clutch a box of chocolates, or be proffering a teensy jewellery box, but there aren’t any small enough in the doll’s house store. Cale opens the letter and runs his hand over his head to wipe the crease off his brow.
‘The landowners either side of us sold,’ he says.
Clary reads the letter, then studies his face, unable to determine what it means.
‘If they wanted, they could build around us,’ she says. ‘Smaller stores, or something.’
The shirt guy reminded them of this when he stopped by again. His jacket was fastened, no handshake was offered, slices of paper left his hand.
‘Obviously, that wouldn’t be the most advantageous solution,’ he said, ‘but…’
Advantageous, Clary thought. She wasn’t sure how to spell it. It sounded like outrageous with advantages tagged on.
Cale straps the last box into the pick-up. Clary winds down the window, lets the cold air hit her all the way out of town. There are hearts in the store window, shiny foil-covered chocolate hearts, heart-shaped cushions, a speckling of cuddly toys with I Love You stitched to their chests like tattoos.
‘Hey!’ The woman behind the counter grins as if she’s bumped into an old friend, but it’s just Cale delivering more mice. His daughter trails behind him, looking at everything on the shelves. He hands over the box of new mice. The woman says ‘awww’, opens the till and counts notes into his hand one at a time, her finger like a fortune-teller’s on his palm.
‘The last mice sold out in a week,’ she says. ‘Can you mount anything else? Nothing too big. Something sweet. I’d love something for Easter.’
She looks at Cale with something in her voice bigger than a mouse. Cale looks at her bare finger stroking a tail and looks away.
‘Dunno,’ he says.
Clary is behind him, right there, like his manager, like all her looking at the weird stuff nearby was a ruse and she was waiting to jump in and do what she had to do.
‘Of course he can do something else,’ she says. ‘He can do anything.’
‘Great, swing by some time and show me what you’ve got,’ the woman says.
They are silent all the drive home, Clary and Cale. She knows he is still thinking about the letter. They look out the windows at the low sun, pools of snow preserved in the shadows of buildings the sunlight can’t touch. They don’t speak until they’re back at the trailer, eating a pizza they bought on the way home.
‘Maybe we should sell,’ Clary says. She does not want to say it, she thought she never would, but she does. She says it like a curse word something won’t let her censor. Her father chews pizza, staring at the letter on the table, a string of cheese connecting the slice to his lips.
‘That’s no way to think, pumpkin, giving up. It’s our land. Besides, where will the jackalopes live?’
He grins best he can, his lips not connected to his eyes.
‘There aren’t any jackalopes, Dad,’ says Clary. ‘Mom only ever hunted dickalope.’
She looks at him, waiting to be corrected for her language, unsure if she’ll ever be a pumpkin again. Cale puts down his slice. The silence stretches between them like cheese on that pizza, thinning, fit to snap.
‘If we aren’t here, how can she come back?’ he says.
Clary looks around the trailer, thinking about her mother. Their life seemed to fit her like the skin of a rabbit on a hare. She was bigger than it. Clary opens her mouth, unable to make her voice low enough for her not to be able to hear it. It’s just words, laid out like red-hot sauce, or thread, on the counter.
‘She’s never coming back,’ she says.
Clary chooses the antlers for the jackalope. Cale lets her watch him work on the rabbit. She squishes the clay that holds in the eyes and watches it transform into something beyond itself. Finally, it’s ready. The rabbit’s antlers rut the spring air like hooks, ready to hang someone’s keys on. Clary puts it in the box and they drive. Together, they stand at the counter of the store. Cale sets the box down. The woman at the till peers inside the box, removing a mist of tissue paper snared on an antler.
‘I made this. I can do as many as you like,’ Cale says. ‘If you wanna give it a go?’