Roots: Part Eleven

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“You can let the rabbit out of the hutch now,” my great-aunt Marie said.

Her eyes were glowing and a long cougar-like tail descended from her skirt and curled around her ankles. I realized I must be dreaming.

“Right,” I said.

The fact that I was dreaming didn’t bother me. I’ve had a few lucid dreams before, but I’m not good at it. Somehow, even though I know I’m dreaming, I can never really make the dream do what I want it to. So I figured I would just go along with whatever bizarre scenario my brain had concocted.

I bent down, lowering the hutch to the ground, and let the rabbit out. The peachy colored bunny hopped out, sniffing the ground with the ritual caution of a domestic prey animal that has never encountered a predator.

Marie leaned down and offered the rabbit a deep purple carrot, the heirloom kind you can get at the supermarket, so I presumed. As the rabbit munched enthusiastically, rustling noises stirred in the bushes near the pond.

I shined my flashlight towards the pond and saw nearly two-dozen rabbits emerging from the bushes. Or at least they were more like rabbits than anything else. They came in many different colors. Some the natural brown to beige tones of wild rabbits, and some the white, black, grey or brown patterns of domestic rabbits. They did look like rabbits, only larger than they should be, and with slightly more human proportions.

Proportions that allowed them to, for instance, stand up on their hind legs and start dancing in a circle around the pond.

My rabbit watched them with interest, and soon hopped over to join them. It was clumsy at first, but soon got the hang of things at its proportions slowly changed to match the others. Since it was a dream, I saw nothing particularly alarming in this.

I was however a bit taken aback when I looked back to Marie and saw that she was holding a piece of carrot cake with dark purple icing.

“Now it’s your turn, dear,” she said. “Do you understand what this means?”

I didn’t. What could a piece of cake mean, in a dream or otherwise? However, I’ve had a number of dreams with cake in them, and I always deeply regret the instances when I don’t get around to eating the cake.

So I nodded and held out my hand.

“Are you sure?” she said.

Was I sure I wanted to eat cake? It wasn’t a particularly fraught question, particularly not in a dream when I didn’t even need to worry about what the excessive sugar would do to my body.

My brow furrowed. “Yes.”

Marie smiled broadly, as if I’d just announced that yes, I was sure I was going to follow in her footsteps into some deeply cherished career path.

The cake tasted unique. Quite floral for a carrot cake, but it was moist, perfectly spiced and the icing had just the right level of sweetness.

After that the dream sort of mixed with the memories I had about the festival earlier that evening. I remember dancing around the pond with the rabbits, and Ann and the others were there too.

Still, even though it had to be a dream, the next morning I still had to deal with the rabbit. She was still too big, and with distinctly bipedal proportions.

“Well,” I said. “I guess I just didn’t notice before, because it was dark.”

The rabbit tilted its head to one side and furrowed its brow.