A Borrower's Anthology

Bunnies

When Michelle had met Nick, he had actually saved her from a horrible case of death by embarrassment. Tied to a rabbit and being dragged screaming through the yard had not been how she'd wanted to go. Yet it had almost happened.

She had been fourteen years old. It was a warm May day; Michelle and her family had gone had gone across the border of their old neighborhood to find a new place of residency. Her father, self-appointed leader as always, led the charge from bus underbelly to lakeside path in search of the ficklest of destination signposts to follow: borrower-tracks.

They were never the physical footprints one would have expected, but sometimes they were simply pieces of clothing or pulleys or crevices that looked just slightly askew against an otherwise well-put together structure. Still, it was a goose hunt to catch any of those marks--much less hope that the borrowers were still there or that their living space was feasible. Sometimes, hunt like these ran the risk of traps. If a family had needed to escape quickly or, worse yet, had been trapped, there was little time to prevent other unfortunate victims from befalling the same fate until it was too late. It was one of the reasons why her dad always had her and her mother wait outside whatever building he investigated.

Michelle fiddled with the small bag on her hip, opening and closing the flap every so often as she kept her eyes on their surroundings. It was the middle of the day and the heat erased any sort of sweat that might have been collecting on Michelle's skin as they traveled. Life bustled around them from footsteps to car horns to cellphone chatter, nonethewiser to the smaller pedestrians under the park bench. The building the bench sat against was a jewelry shop. When they had been walking under the shadows of bushes and outdoor furniture, her mother had spotted the crag first. It looked too thin to slip little more than a piece of paper through, yet her father had found a piece of the concrete that led to an open crawlspace. He'd been in there for about two minutes now.

Michelle broke her stare from the park clock as she heard a loud laugh across acres of flat grass. A pair of human sisters was playing fetch with a yellow, shaggy-looking dog, tossing a Frisbee back and forth as the dog attempted to retrieve it from the middle. It would have been nice to have an animal companion like that. They would have been able to move from place-to-place--maybe even tie a bag around the animal's collar for transport. Dogs, she'd heard, were plenty smart and loyal, so it would have been able to take orders from anyone in her family. The only problem was making sure the thirty-foot canine didn't decide to eat them to start with.

"Mom, have you never thought about having another kid?" Michelle asked.

"What for? I have you, sweetheart." Her mother tore her eyes away from the same sight and smiled down at her. One arm came around in a side-hug, since they were almost the same height now. "You mean the world to me, and between you and your father, my world isn't terribly big," she said. "I'm very happy with what I have either way."

Michelle frowned, but didn't comment when she leaned against her mother. She knew it was a lost battle. Still, she had hoped her mother would one day have a change of heart. She knew the dangers of having too many family members for their lifestyle. Yet would it really have been so detrimental to their sneaking around if she'd had one little brother or sister to spend time with?

Soon enough, her father emerged from the crack with a frazzled hairstyle and an earring hook on his hip. Michelle perked up immediately when she was beckoned forward. "Did you find anything? Wait, you're giving this to me?" She held her hands out to take the earring, its gold material causing a little light to refract onto the ground. "How come?"

"There was someone living there," her father said. Something about his face was perturbed. "But they gave some advice about where to look for a new home. They wanted me to give this to you. Thought you could use your own, instead of borrowing ours."