Metaphor

I am a literalist more than I would like, and so, when you say, hares are soft meat, I think of our honeymoon out west, and of that restaurant, that floating restaurant we went to on the ship in Vancouver, or was it Victoria? And of how there was a buffet with frog’s legs and shark and rabbit – which isn’t hare, I know, but the closest I’ve ever come to knowing soft hare’s meat, though I don’t think I ate it. I think you were the only one who ate it, and I probably stuck with the chicken, or maybe, no, I tried a little piece of thigh off your plate because I usually feel compelled to at least try something once. It was dark and tender, like a small taste of wild opening in my mouth. It was not a taste I enjoyed, but it was an expensive restaurant and we were poor, of course we were poor; we were so young – you too young even to be eligible for the insurance of the rental car that we used for the wedding. The white Crown Victoria. Like the city we were headed for with money stuffed in our pockets from our parents. (What were they thinking letting us go off like that so young? Not that we would have let them stop us.) Driving out from the prairies with our shiny rings to wake the next morning inside a heavy fog over the lake and blue mountains, and fat flakes of snow falling down to smother the summer green. We couldn’t see a thing, and we had paid so much money for the view, almost as much for one night there as half our new couch in our new apartment with the good light and the blooming lilac in the backyard, and the neighbour who chain-smoked and filled our place with the smell. Snow in June. We didn’t know what it meant. Not that it mattered. We only closed the door after waking and burrowed back into the rumpled sheets. Like rabbits. Or hares. So young. Soft meat. Quivering.