The View

After the borrowed years, the Rabbit and his family bought a house of their own.

In the village.
Above a valley.
A river running along the bottom of it, and the rolling hills folding away on the other side, the kind of hills that change colour through the day and never quite stay the same.

The view was the first thing.
It is the first thing for everyone.

No animal has ever come to that house and not said it.
They step out of the car, or they stand at the window with a cup of something, and they go quiet for a second, and then they say it.
The view.
How lucky you are.
I could look at that forever.

And it is true.
The Rabbit looks at it too, and on the good days it still catches him.

That is the part of the house that faces outward.
The part that is photographed.
The part that animals carry away with them and describe to other animals.
A man who built something once, who lost it, who came home with twenty suitcases, and who has somehow ended up in a house above a river with a view people envy.

From the road, it is a happy ending.

The Rabbit knew, going in, that it was not quite that.
The house was not perfect, and he knew some of it before he ever moved in.
The survey had been honest about one thing, at least.
Woodworm.
So the Rabbit had it treated, the way you treat a thing you have been warned about, and told himself that was that.

What the Rabbit did not understand yet was the rhythm of the place.
That the house would not give him its problems all at once, like a survey, like a list he could clear and be done with.
It would give them to him slowly.
One at a time.
For years.

A constant stream, arriving from inside a thing that looked, from the road, like an ending the Rabbit had earned.