The Hare can go from room to room without so much as glancing at a door-handle. Door-handles are how the flu virus is spread, and the Hare hasn’t suffered from it once.

There is a window to a room much like a shopfront, and the shop sells teapots and deer-heads. The teapots have holes in and the deer-heads are annoying.  People go by, mostly minding their own petty business; it is raining, and they all look worrisome and worn, like it’s acid rain, and they’re all carrying solemn-looking statues  of themselves.

The shopkeeper is constantly adding his own money to the till, so that when the owner Mr. Samuel Glazer - minus his recently deceased son – returns he won’t be as furious as usual. The shopkeeper has been entrusted with supervising the Glazer’s 7-year old daughter, Elizabeth. As Easter is approaching, she is painting eggs. The other children are peeling potatoes. The supply of eggs is constant.

The Hare is growing tired of the smell of the room, and all those broken, messy eggshells, and the proud, reluctant sobbing of the potato-peeling children.

For all his talk of tardiness, Mr. Glazer is half-an-hour late already. His precious pipsqueak of a daughter has not yet managed to paint one egg without breaking it, and she insists that it is the stench of the other children that is distracting her.   

Thomas cuts his finger on the knife, and sheds a tear.

The shopkeeper looks coldly at a Elizabeth, with a stare she refuses to acknowledge.

To his dismay and bewilderment, the Hare is unable to leave through these walls. He can only watch the pungent room as events unravel like a disease.

DOWNLOAD: Whittle Me a Teacup by RAS

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