Grandma Harken stepped forward. She rolled both her sleeves up to the elbow and offered him her wrists.
The Patterned Man stared at her, unblinking. The ravens laughed to themselves at the bottom of the wash. Then he dipped his head and bowed to Grandma Harken and a rattlesnake as long as a man slithered away into the evening.
She let out a breath she didn’t know she’d been holding. “He didn’t ask for a life.”
The Father of Rabbits grinned. “Ah, you know. Maybe he wasn’t hungry. Maybe it was enough you made the offer.”
“Maybe I’m too old and stringy,” she said.
“Could be that, too.”
The jackalope wife was breathing. Her pulse went fast then slow. Grandma sat down beside her and held her wrist between her own callused palms.
“How long you going to wait?” asked the Father of Rabbits.
“As long as it takes,” she snapped back.
The sun went down while they were waiting. The coyotes sang up the moon. It was half–full, half–new, halfway between one thing and the other.
“She doesn’t have to stay human, you know,” said the Father of Rabbits. He picked up the cigarettes that the Patterned Man had left behind and offered one to Grandma.
“She doesn’t have a jackalope skin anymore.”
He grinned. She could just see his teeth flash white in the dark. “Give her yours.”
“I burned it,” said Grandma Harken, sitting up ramrod straight. “I found where he hid it after he died and I burned it myself. Because I had a new husband and a little bitty baby girl and all I could think about was leaving them both behind and go dance.”
The Father of Rabbits exhaled slowly in the dark.
“It was easier that way,” she said. “You get over what you can’t have faster that you get over what you could. And we shouldn’t always get what we think we want.”
They sat in silence at the top of the bluff. Between Grandma’s hands, the pulse beat steady and strong.
“I never did like your first husband much,” said the Father of Rabbits.
“Well,” she said. She lit her cigarette off his. “He taught me how to swear. And the second one was better.”
The jackalope wife stirred and stretched. Something flaked off her in long strands, like burnt scraps of paper, like a snake’s skin shedding away. The wind tugged at them and sent them spinning off the side of the bluff.
From down in the desert, they heard the first notes of a sudden wild music.
“It happens I might have a spare skin,” said the Father of Rabbits. He reached into his pack and pulled out a long gray roll of rabbit skin. The jackalope wife’s eyes went wide and her body shook with longing, but it was human longing and a human body shaking.
“Where’d you get that?” asked Grandma Harken, suspicious.
“Oh, well, you know.” He waved a hand. “Pulled it out of a fire once — must have been forty years ago now. Took some doing to fix it up again, but some people owed me favors. Suppose she might as well have it… Unless you want it?”
He held it out to Grandma Harken.
She took it in her hands and stroked it. It was as soft as it had been fifty years ago. The small sickle horns were hard weights in her hands.
“You were a hell of a dancer,” said the Father of Rabbits.
“Still am,” said Grandma Harken, and she flung the jackalope skin over the shoulders of the human jackalope wife.
It went on like it had been made for her, like it was her own. There was a jagged scar down one foreleg where the rattlesnake had bit her. She leapt up and darted away, circled back once and bumped Grandma’s hand with her nose — and then she was bounding down the path from the top of the bluff.
The Father of Rabbits let out a long sigh. “Still are,” he agreed.
“It’s different when you got a choice,” said Grandma Harken.
They shared another cigarette under the standing stone.
Down in the desert, the music played and the jackalope wives danced. And one scarred jackalope went leaping into the circle of firelight and danced like a demon, while the moon laid down across the saguaro’s thorns.
Copyright
Published in Apex Magazine Jan 7, 2014 (Issue 56)
© Ursula Vernon