Reginald was a journeyman Easter Bunny. He had apprenticed for two years in western Tasmania and took a remedial skip-hopping course in Liverpool before landing this plum of an assignment in Banff, Alberta. Within 24 hours of unpacking his portmanteau in this pine-scented paradise, Reginald knew he was “home”
.
It was early September so Reggie had a full six months to prepare for the first Sunday after the first Friday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox. According to his “Lagomorph Day Timer,” Reggie was supposed to spend the rest of September making peeps, those yellow and pink marshmallow chicks with those little black-dot eyes. However, being a bit of a procrastinator, he squandered his first fortnight pub-crawling this rapidly-emptying tourist haven looking for “the wound that never heals.” (He was a rabbit you know.)
He eventually connected with an ash-blond groundhog, named Matilda, whose defenses were dulled due to the impending onset of her hibernation. Reginald then wasted the months of October (supposedly, jelly beans and cellophane-grass production time), November (decorated chocolate viewing-eggs with bucolic internal dioramas), and December (spangled straw Easter baskets with purple and yellow ribbons) taking this woodchickie’s internal temperature with his peniometer and popping tequilas con Seven Up.
By mid December, both Reggie and his perpetually-damp swiv-mate had fornicated themselves into a deep coma, augmented by extended hangovers and Nature’s own seasonal tropism. They awoke only once in early February when some gentlemen in top hats and tails removed Matilda from their den briefly to hold her up to a leaden winter sky in some homo-erectus shadow-seeing spring ritual.
Reggie awoke in a terror-sweat in late March to the thumping of the Grand Bunny on the stump outside this sex warren. Quickly realizing that Easter was only days off, he tried to tweedle-talk his way out of this very bad box. But the Grand Bunny wasn’t buying his patter and he demoted Reggie on the spot. He then hustled Reggie onto the next jumbo jet to Stuttgart with some papers indicating he was to report to the chief chef at a famous German culinary school called “Hass und Pfeiffer”.
© Copyright, George W. Potts
