The Graveyard of the Rabbits

Breda had always been attuned to the land. 

It felt safe, the vigour of the loam, the crops' regiment, the hedgerow theatre.  It all made sense to her, a salve in the strictures of a limited life.

Breda was the only daughter of the minister. Her days were the calculus of mass and mission, assisting her father and mother in their service to the Lord. They were important people in the tight congregation of Hamfleet, a rural parish on the edge of the marshes.

Her own calling was to nature, to the natural world, the churn of the seasons and the energy stored like blood in the ancient soils around her.

Breda, when excused, would wander the holloways and hundreds outside their Hamfleet, exploring the fauna and wildlife she encountered, marking their identities in her notebook with pen and pencil, pondering the sorcery of science.

She would gain their measure, fathom their habits and record her rendezvous's meticulously on paper. 

It was on such a day that Breda came across an abandoned church on a well-hidden hill and certainly not one she had visited before.

It was derelict, a broken ruin of the divine, no longer serving it's followers, whoever they were. 

No discernible trace of the face of its religion could be found and Breda, taking notes and sketches, promised to ask her parents of this lonely chapel on the mound.

Even the gravestones were weathered and withered away, their incumbents remaining as invisible as the thoughts they were buried with, the clandestine boxed voices in the tilth of the hillside.

Yet, activity there was among these remains.

Small bones, and some larger, erupted from the yard, resting atop fine mounds of earth dug up by unseen hands.

Mixed within the humanity were animal skulls and fur, natural clues as to the new parishioners, the resident warren of grave rabbits, unearthing the interred bit by skeletal bit.

Knuckles, tarsels, eardrums and femur heads were scattered around the disturbed skirt of the chapel like the grim residue of some great battle in the hoary past.

These were the rudiments of the church- goers, dead and rising by the labours of springtails, their beliefs a mystery but death came regardless.

The rabbits were bring them forth to the fallow surface to see in a new day.

Breda was mesmerised by the chiaroscuro of rodents burrowing among the wrecks of the faithful like clergy tending it's flock.

Here was a bone-strewn interface, a bleached pane through which the murk of human existence could be peeked, the very gyroscope of creed and damnation before her.

She sat on an outcrop of freshly dug silt and skeletal remains. The mound sank ever so slightly and she felt oddly comfortable in it. 

Sunning her face she placed her palms on the old grass and felt something hard and brittle.

It was a rabbit's skull, perfectly intact and bleached china-white by the rays of the ever-watchful orb.

She held the skull in front of her face. 

It's deep sockets enthralled her, it's porcelain precision a wonder to behold. 

Somewhere in that hidden bowl behind had nestled a wild brain, which knew only the faith of the field, the credo of the graves.

She envied the rabbit's earthed conviction and imagined life in the communal warren, those furred souls romping among the human dead. Psychopomps in the burrows.

Breda lay back fully, sensed Hamfleet and her parents misting over and felt the soft till shifting beneath her. The friable grains of sacred soil rose and she slept contentedly in the warmth of the waning afternoon.

As the day fogged into evening the denizens of the graveyard gathered around the sleeping girl and watched as her form fell deeper into the ground like an egg cracked into flour.

They were excited, the rabbits. 

They burrowed and tunnelled and by nightfall Breda was gone, lost in the shallows among the old faithful ones.

Nothing remained of the girl.

Nothing at all until by turns, the busy husbandry of tooth and claw ejected the first of her bones from the secret ossuary beneath the church.

Her pallid skull, clean as alabaster in the moon's ancient glow, licked and caressed by the yard's residents, now sat around it in a circle chattering amongst themselves.

Next came her notebook, with sketches of death, which they stared at with great interest.

They waited and waited patiently for the rest to rise and join them.