Mystery march Hare

By Rachel H Grant

The white stones glinted in the moonlight, winking to each other, sharing a secret that no one else could see.

Together, the stones formed a large white hare on Atlas Hill, known locally as Hare Hill. A large emerald crystal awarded the hare an all seeing sparkling eye.

One cold snow-swept spring day a hare appeared in the nearby village of Hareton. A mad March hare, he ran ecstatically round Hareton Park, almost falling in to the village pond several times. Then the behaviour changed.

The hare calmed down like a flowerbud closing at dusk. He appeared at the nursing home door, desperately scratching at it like a lost dog come home. Nonagenarian Gwen nervously opened the door, her furtive frown turning in to diamonds of delight in her eyes. The hare ran round her legs like a dog finding its owner. Tears fell from Gwen’s eyes. It was a sign from heaven, she was sure.

The hare jumped up the stairs to the common room.  Sleeping residents woke abruptly to mad antics and acrobatics, the hare running along the piano and sautéing from table to table. Uproar ushered in laughter, as healing tears of joy soothed aching hearts.

Then the hare leapt from a window, and was gone.

Next, it was the primary school’s turn. The hare ran through the playground like a hurricane, winds that whispered of wanton fun, a child’s dreamcatcher in brown fur, a happy poem in mad motion.

Over the next few weeks, on random days the hare appeared in either the nursing home or school playground, greeted by merriment wherever he went, a mad grin of mirth on his face. On his last day in the village, insanity itched inside him as he leapt for joy and ran as though for his life, the mad hare in a final dance of the demented.

Then both the hare and the stone hare on the hill disappeared, never to be seen again.

A barren patch of earth was all that remained on the hill, and the green emerald eye, hidden mysteries lurking deep inside, secrets unspoken.

Then one day the emerald stone disappeared too.

The next day, a schoolkid reported that he had seen a green hare outside his bedroom window, in fact it could have been an emerald hare.

The emerald hare became an urban legend, a story for bedtime, a hymn of hope. For the emerald hare, so the story goes, appears when a new baby arrives in Hareton or the wider countryside area. He is seen fleetingly then is gone, a modern mystery in sparkling green, a childhood story that will never die. For some tales are made to be repeated, dream dust teasing reality, a fantasy in crystal, a story of spring, the fable of the mad March hare.