The Only Shirt

They went to stay with the Otter's mum.
In Rothbury.
It was meant to be two weeks.

It became two years.

The world had closed by then.
A virus had stopped everything outside, and the Rabbit, who had spent seven years moving at the speed of a company, was suddenly inside a small house in a small village with nowhere to be and nothing to run toward.

For a long time he could not tell the difference between resting and disappearing.

There was the matter of the shirts.

For seven years the Rabbit had worn the same logo on his chest.
The company t-shirt.
He had so many of them that they were, in effect, his entire wardrobe.
He had not noticed it happening.
You do not notice a costume when you never take it off.

Now the company was gone, and the shirts remained.
Drawers of them.
A wardrobe full of a name that no longer belonged to him, worn soft and thin by years.

He kept wearing them.
At first because they were what he had.
Then because he did not know what an animal wore when it was no longer the thing on the shirt.

That, more than the money or the flight or the van, was the quiet wound.
The Rabbit went looking for himself in the drawer one morning and found only the company.
Seven years, and he had forgotten to keep anything that was just his.

So the recovery, when it came, was not dramatic.
It did not look like recovery.
It looked like a man in a borrowed house slowly working out what he liked, what he wore, what he thought, when no one was measuring his output.

He did a little contracting, to keep the lights on.
A friend brought him in to a company called Amplience.
Not a rescue. Just a door someone held open, the way doors sometimes get held open by the few animals who remember you exist when you are not useful to them.

It was not a triumphant time.
There is no scene here where the Rabbit stands up renewed.

But it was the first time in years that the days were his own to fill.
The first slow undressing of an identity he had worn until it had worn into him.

He would not have called it a beginning at the time.
At the time it felt like wreckage, and waiting, and a village that was meant to be temporary.

Only later could he see it for what it was.
The first of his new beginnings.
The years where the Rabbit started, very quietly, to find out what was left of him once you took the shirt off.