Penny for Your Thoughts

The laughter of the day echoed with impermanence.
  Even as Ritchie Warren played leaping stones with Penny Mossburrow, he felt rushed and pulled. And it was not just Penny that was pulling him, but something with a much more fateful grasp of his heart.
  But whatever it was, it could wait for Penny. She was, after all, as pretty and mild a rabbit as Ritchie was a bold and simple one, and he could wait. It was no wonder that he had chased her playfully all morning, eager as he was to watch her run before him in a seemingly innocent game of tag.
  Such was the waltz of summer, with green and tawny landscapes to fuel the imagination, and long days to imagine in. Such were the days in which Ritchie stroked those innocent cheeks and asked Penny questions for which youth and love have only one answer. Such were these days. 
  But they was not to last. This afternoon her parents had wanted her home, where Ritchie could not follow. Her parents would never allow her to be around the son of that horrible Mr. Warren, who was known to have a frightening domestic temper.
  But the fact was that Ritchie himself, while perhaps a little bit of a free spirit, was as respectable as he could be, even though his reputation would always be a whispered affair.
  Walking Penny to a safe distance from her home, he left her with the promise of tomorrow hanging in her long soft ears.
    At first he thought he might wait for her there, in the soft patch of grass by the meadow, but thought better of it. He would walk home through the thickets and the trees, as he had first intended. 
    With the remainder of the afternoon staring him down, Ritchie thought he might go to the pond nearby, where his friend Mark would undoubtedly be fishing. He thought about his friend the otter, whom he had met under rather awkward circumstances the year before.
  As it always is with summer, time is seemingly immortal. While it seemed to take Ritchie an hour to reach the overgrown pond, it was really only a matter of twenty minutes or so. He approached the place thoughtlessly, as was his nature, and so found the surprised Mark giving a pretty girl otter a very warm goodbye. As fond of females as he was, Mark, it seemed, was never able to be alone with one for more than a couple of minutes, as had happened when Ritchie stumbled upon his subtle venture into the lips of his newest lady friend. 
  Apologizing to both Mark and his other, Ritchie began to excuse himself from his friend’s personal scene. But Mark, as cynical as ever, told him to stay while promising youth and years to his lady, and was off to see Ritchie through the day.
  Mark asked Ritchie about his mother, and he replied that she was doing as well as could be expected of a woman in her position. Mark had learned some time ago that asking about Ritchie’s father was not an intelligent thing to do, and even his mother was a touchy subject. Mark himself had been an orphan, and so familial matters were rarely the chief subject of conversation between the two friends, but he always felt he had to ask.
  The odd pair wandered about the meadows and little streams, sometimes talking of trivial things, sometimes of nothing at all. Their friendship was now more of a routine than anything else, and their time was spent answering usual questions with usual answers, engaging in expected activities, and being bored of boredom.
  In that type of situation, one does not usually probe too deep into the other’s personal affairs. But today Mark tested that rule.
  “So, Ritchie, I hear your loving yourself a little rabbit lady?”
  “We’re not that far yet.”
  Mark, who was half asleep in a tall patch of grass, nodded his head.
  “Oh, sure, but I was just wondering how your folks like her.”
  “They haven’t met her.”
  “Well, I’m sure your Pa will be impressed.”
  At that moment Ritchie was playing with a little purple flower he had found. When next Mark looked, Ritchie was very tense, and he was tearing apart the little flower.
  “I’ll make sure that bastard never even sees one hair on her body.”
  Mark knew that he had said the wrong thing, and after he stood up from his napping bed he made show to leave, saying that it was getting a little late, and he with dinner to make and all. Ritchie knew what he meant, and after a short goodbye, he was walking toward his own home at the stream nearby.
  He did not feel ashamed as he thought softly of Penny while he walked back alone. Her soft brown eyes and downy fur moved in his head like a figure in clay being molded in his paws. Penny was young and innocent; he was not, although he knew that was what intrigued her most about him.
  So immersed was he in adolescent contemplation that he had not the awareness of how beautiful a summer evening escaped him. The air itself seemed lilac, and the droning of the insects incensed the nerves as does the sound of a metronome. The tunnel through the grass, which was in fact a complex roadway made by decades of rabbits passing to and fro through the undergrowth, leaned and swayed in front of his eyes as if in some hypnotic dance.
  But all of it escaped the young rabbit, who plodded on in mere contention with himself, the world, and even life.  Now it seemed he did not feel the impermanence which had all but shook him that morning. But he should have.
  His father was home, and temper had him.
  Ritchie was near upon seeing the lights of his small home, set cunningly in a stream bank, when he heard his mother cry out. Every muscle in Ritchie’s body was alert, while in his mind, a dread had come as suddenly. He had before seen his mother cry because of his father, but after the last time…
  He expected the worst.
  Whether or not it would have been best to fly or charge never occurred to Ritchie, for it was in his youthful character to be bold and simple. The door to his home lay wide and yawning, and a dull light poured weakly over the soft grasses near the shallow stream.
  Ritchie entered swiftly, not wishing to prolong the inevitable encounter which now faced him.
  The image which faced him would have no doubt been seen as having been drawn from the most twisted, rotting organ of youth. But for Ritchie Warren it was a scene he had witnessed countless times in his childhood. His mother was a small rabbit; but now, strewn crying on the floor, she looked like a doll, a child’s plaything cast aside. Her fur, usually pale and soft, was now darkened by tears and the streaming wounds which had sprung up near her left eye.
  Ritchie looked indifferently at his mother, and as she saw him standing in the doorway she thought to say something, but her tears drowned out her words.
  The fur on Ritchie’s neck rose, whether he wanted it to or not; he remembered how his mother had looked the last time his father had beaten her.
  He had been little then, or he might have tried to stop his father. Instead his mother had fainted from the beating, and Ritchie was left with the remainder of his father’s wrath. He had been given a scar on his forepaw after his father had broken it, and he remembered it always. And he remembered now.
  His father stood nearby, silently fuming. In almost all ways, Ritchie resembled his father; tall, lean, and dark with brilliantly fair eyes. They were almost identical. Except that Mr. Warren was fond of hurting his wife.
  Ritchie did not quite know what happened then, but it was all he could do to keep from killing his father.
  Whack!
  Without a word of reproach he had struck his father’s jaw at full tilt, and it showed as Mr. Warren fell back over the wooden chair which stood behind him.
  Ritchie was not amazed at what he had done, nor was he proud of it. As much as he hated his father, he had also admired him for his strength and commanding presence.
  But now, he realized, he hated both of them. He hated his mother for her weakness, and his father for his cruelty. He looked at them. His mother had no more tears, but her body still shivered as she hoarsely called for him, her eyes shut with her own shame. His father, whom he now saw to be under the influence of some foreign substance, most likely gin, was frozen where he lay with rage and drink. With hateful eyes and loud words he cast Ritchie as a coward. He tried to say something more to insult his son, but not a word of it reached Ritchie; he was no longer a part of that world.
  Without a word about his thoughts, he turned and fled from his old life. He fled from his mother crying his name, his father swearing at him, and yes, even from Mark.
  And so he fled, with a stony heart, to Penny’s windowsill, in the quiet dreaming of a summer night.