“I don’t understand,” said the Rifle. She was thinking that the rabbit she had shot looked older far than this one, with fur all matted and a bite-scar down its nose, and one eye swollen half-shut from some fever. The tanning and stuffing had made the Rabbit youthful and new.

“Because you are a tool, and tools are told that Real means they can leave a part of the world changed. They are taught to look down on toys, but at the nursery there lived a red rifle who fired a cork on a string. She dreamed of being Real, but she had never heard of killing. I can’t suppose any child who played with her for very long would ever call you Real. After all, you aren’t painted red.”

“I must be a little Real, for I shot you,” said the Rifle, an unfamiliar sadness weighing down her pride. “And I don’t doubt that you are, if you say.”

“Of course you are Real. But what if I had shot you? Would they call me a Real rabbit then?” The white star Polaris landed on his glass eye—one eye or the other, depending on where you stood. “I loved the Skin Horse for his caring kindness and sateen nose, and I believe he loved me. But we thought ourselves so much less than our masters. It never seemed to us that our own love could make us Real, let alone that we didn’t need it to. I’ve been turned from one kind of rabbit into another and again, and they’re all very much alike: people constantly saying you’re not Real, and using you as though you don’t matter. Real is always just out of reach, the way we hear the humans talk; and because we aren’t Real, whatever way they treat us is acceptable. But Real isn’t how you’re made or what happens to you; it’s only that you are. Everything is Real, everything in every way that’s ever been. That is the world’s sum and the world’s heritage, and there might as well be no such thing at all.”