“You sure they are asleep?,” the fidgety brown and white mouse called to his neighbor.
“Well, the woman plopped me in my domain and the man checked the door and turned off the lights. So, I would say yes,” replied the lop-eared rabbit.
Sharing his first name with Beverly Cleary’s famous literary mouse, Ralph peeked out of his woven wigwam house, scurried over to a new paper towel tube and got to work. Scritch. Scratch. Scritch.
“What you working on today?,” Poppy, the broken black patterned rabbit, asked?
“The boy finally dropped in that new cardboard tube that I could see for days on the other side of my wall,” Ralph said. “Now, I want to knaw here and there,” he explained, gesturing with a tiny paw, “to make a custom connector chute.”
“You know I never get to look at your handiwork,” the rabbit reminded him. “The woman brought me the best box yesterday,” Poppy said, trying not to brag. “I heard the man say it is corrugated. I guess that means sturdy. It has a lid and I fit just right. Maybe chewing it to pieces can wait a day or two.”
Darkness softened in the entryway hours later as night began to yield with the coming dawn. Ralph’s 20-gallon aquarium, the former home of a bearded dragon, grew quiet as the mouse stepped off his yellow spinning exercise disc. He picked up one strip of shredded paper bedding then another, holding each for a handful of seconds.
“Find any ‘messages’ today?,” Poppy asked.
“A few,” Ralph admitted. “The man ran out of the good cross-cut stuff from the recycling center and put in these longer strips after the last cleaning. These seven slices from one sheet talk about somebody called ‘IRS.’”
“Fun,” his friend said as the hallway light flicked to life. Poppy heard Ralph rush into his tube. “I bet they let me roam again this morning. Talk to you tonight,” she called.
By late-morning the lop had been taken to an outside hutch next to her other neighbor. Poppy decided to sit atop her repurposed kitty litter bucket when Honey asked, “Get any greens?”
“Not today,” she told the castor mini-rex rabbit.
Large chunks of cardboard littered the bottom of Honey’s two-level hutch where she sat on the ramp chewing thoughtfully through the leg of a pair of jeans. “Me either.”
“The boy and girl have been talking about eggs and a bunny named ‘Easter’ this week,” Poppy said. “I hope, if he really does come to visit, they have a guest-domain somewhere.”
“Well, he is not staying with me,” Honey agreed.
“It sounds like he brings candy and hides eggs without being seen then moves on,” Poppy speculated.
“Great! Nothing to upset my routine,” Honey approved. “So, since the shorter humans are expecting treats maybe we will find new boxes, carrots and kale inside Sunday. I always have a good view of the family’s recycling bin and compost pail from my laundry room domain, and there are sure to be some choice items kept from both for us.”
Both just over a year old, neither rabbit remembered their first Easter. For Poppy and Honey, Holy Week and the Lenten season would henceforth mean the time of year when people seemed to like rabbits a bit more and that they could soon spend time nibbling grass again in their own run at the foot of the lilacs.