Dancing Rabbit

James overtook another car as Alice watched the blue triangle on Google Maps edge closer to Canberra. Confident there was still time, she tossed her phone on the dashboard, only to retrieve it and confirm once more they wouldn’t be late for James’ work emergency.  

In the backseat, their daughter, Eliza, was unaware that her first holiday had been cut short. She had somehow remained unconscious all morning, even as her father scooped her out of bed, argued with the hotel concierge, and sprinted across the carpark with her under his arm like a football. Only now was she beginning to stir, and as she shifted her weight, her curls, which had been pressed flat against the booster-seat, fell naturally across her face. Eliza swept the blonde hair aside with her chubby fists and then, like always, asked for her toy rabbit.  

The rabbit’s name was Princep, which was a younger Eliza’s best attempt at pronouncing ‘Princess’. During car trips, Eliza kept Princep safe by wrapping one arm over the fluffy rabbit’s shoulder like a seatbelt. That’s why, when she called out for the rabbit, her mother assumed it had escaped Eliza’s grasp and checked the floor at her feet. Alice felt nothing but plastic and lint, so she loosened the seatbelt, twisted her shoulders and surveyed the entire backseat. Then she asked James to pull over and together they checked the bags, the boot and the compartments. There was no rabbit.

James gave up on the search and began marking number plates as they passed. “What do you reckon?” he asked. 

“She loves that rabbit so much,” said Alice. 

James nodded and kicked a rock towards a ditch. He missed it because he shifted his attention back to Alice, but the rock, carving a unique path down the embankment, rolled much longer than he would have anticipated. “She’ll have a fit if we don’t go back,” he said.

“Well, maybe that’s a sign,” said Alice.  

“A sign of what?” 

“That it’s best we keep going,” she whispered. “Perhaps it’s time.”

The rock, which moments earlier James kicked, continued its search for a resting place. Once found, that’s where the rains and morning dew will slowly dull its edges, and where, untouched by anything living for the next hundred years, the beating sun will fade its ancient hide. 

James looked up at that familiar sun, early in its rise, and felt the heat on his cheeks. “I do really need to get back,” he said, and with that the parents decided to continue. 

They broke the news to Eliza on the roadside, accompanied by the sound of fading car engines and the air pressure from passing trucks. To that point, Eliza’s existence had consisted of her parents, their home, the back seat of the Toyota, daycare and Princep, so the news fell heavy. Her normally pleasant disposition gave way to dull and continuous sobbing, and her parents took turns consoling the broken girl until their shirts wore the stains of her loss. They felt her pain as their own. 

As the minutes passed, however, her initial weeping gave way and soon Eliza was pushing at her parents’ chests and screaming at them for what she, at the ripe age of four, considered their betrayal. 

Not deterred, Alice tried again to hug her daughter but caught an errant finger in the eye. She recoiled in pain and her husband peeled back her hands to check for any damage. She was fine, so James marched to the driver’s side and started the car. They would continue on with their daughter’s screaming and kicking in place of the radio, or the pleasant recollections of their trip, or the voice recording of James’ speech for that afternoon, which had previously been on loop.  

Minutes later, however, they rounded a bend in the Federal Highway just as a ray of sunshine pierced the clouds, and Eliza fell silent. 

Outside was open farming country. Lush, rolling hills covered the near-endless plains, and Eliza took in the sight for the first time, having missed it on the drive to Sydney because her seat faced the other direction. 

Fence poles connected by wire separated each paddock and plot of land. Eliza tried her best to count the poles, following them toward the horizon with her finger, and the exercise led her gaze to a series of towers that sprouted like giant flowers from the most distant hill. These were the wind turbines east of Lake George. 

Each turbine waved slowly at the young girl who wiped the tears from her eyes and waved back. They were a further distance away than Eliza previously knew existed, and this new knowledge led her to a realisation. 

If the world spanned an equal distance beyond the horizon, then perhaps Princep was already on the other side, waving at the rear of those turbines from her own winding road. Or, perhaps Princep was twice as far away and in another direction, for in a world so big there seemed little limitations on where Princep could go, or whom she might be with.  

In her mind’s eye, Eliza then imagined Princep meeting another girl on her travels. 

The girl was alone in a dark room with no light but for the glow bordering a door, the handle of which was too high to reach on her own. The girl cried for help and when she turned, expecting to find only darkness, there was Princep’s shimmering golden crown. 

It occurred to Eliza that the number of girls Princep could aid before her fur decayed may outnumber the fence poles, towers and even blades of grass before her. To cling to any sorrow, then, and ignore the sum of the other girls’ joy and love and grief averted, was a selfish act. Her friend was not lost. 

Her friend was freed.

Still, even with the ‘loss’ reframed, Eliza could not shake a selfish, though human, desire. She dreamed that her dearest friend would visit once more, a long time from now when Eliza is preparing to leave this mortal plain, and in that final rendezvous she hopes Princep will lay upon her wrinkled brow the sweet kiss of nostalgia. To see the world through a child’s eyes again was the four year old’s only wish. Then, with her full blessing and a catalogue of memories, she would board the wings of a dove and allow her soul to be carried to a destination none can describe, to a place beyond another horizon. 

The image of that final ascent brought a single tear to the girl’s cheek, and then the farmland disappeared behind a bend in the road, so she turned her attention to the rearview mirror. 

“I suppose everything is transient,” she said, “so we should not bare our teeth at the coming darkness.”

Her father stopped mouthing along to the recording of his speech and said, “What’s that, Sweetie?”  

Eliza scratched her chin as if it were covered in grey stubble and considered, for a moment, what words might reach her father. Then they came to her.

 “As I look upon the vastness of space,” she began, “and now come to terms with the relentless advance of time, I can’t help but feel gratitude for the moments I shared with Princep. I appreciate now that those seconds, hours and days, much like this car ride, much like you and Mummy, much like even the stars and the moon, were finite - everything ends.  

“And this end point,” claimed the four year old, “leads many to the forgivable though fallible conclusion that life is a journey. But it’s not a journey, is it? For on a journey one is going somewhere - there’s a destination - and I ask you, Mummy and Daddy, where are we really headed? No, I think the philosopher Alan Watts encapsulated it accurately when he claimed that life is like a dance, and during a dance the point is the dance itself. There’s nothing outside it. You feel the rhythm, you smile at your partner, and then it ends, and what comes next, well, who knows?” 

At this point, the car sat by the side of the Federal Highway at the end of a long strip of skid marks, with James and Alice twisted in their seats to face their daughter, who sat with her legs crossed and hands clasping her elevated knee. Eliza inspected her nails then returned to her parents’ stunned faces and smiled through closed lips. Though no words were exchanged, all three understood.

Soon their daughter’s smile will shift once more, and on that day she will gaze upon them with sympathy and offer her hand to their fading grip. And on that day, not far off in the calendar of the stars, they will lose control of their bodies, their strength and control shot, their independence lost. And on that day, though they clench their minds, they will struggle to recall the names of the people and places they had loved. 

This is a fate common to all but those who die too young. Yet in this guarantee resides a choice, a decision regarding whether to drive headlong and miss much of the detail that makes a life, or to dance. 

In the silence, James started the car. Eliza felt the vibrations through her booster seat, and then watched as her father steered the vehicle onto the highway and searched for the safest place to do a u-turn.

---

---