The Playground of Imagination

by Shaylen Maxwell

“Take a look at this,” I cry, bursting into my husband’s office with a small, brown rabbit in my palm. “I made Dixie,” I announce, thrusting the figurine out in front of his face and nearly breaking his nose.

“Neat,” he replies, rather unenthusiastically.

“Don’t you see? I’m making tiny sculptures of each of my muses. This is the one I modeled on Dixie. I’m probably going to call her Emerald ... or Bitsy ... you remember: the exiled rabbit in that novel I mentioned I might write. I’m going to make her sister, too.”

“How’s the editing coming along?”

“Good ... Now what do you think – should her sister be white, or should I make her pink?”

“I have to work,” he sighs. “I’m in a meeting, currently.”

I eye his computer, seeing his fingers still fastened to the keys. “Oh. Oops! I’ll come back later,” I apologize. I kiss his cheek and scurry out of the room and back to my office next door.

I return to my packages of clay and admire the brown rabbit I’ve just meticulously created. I feel like a mother with parturient flesh, eyeing my newborn babe. “You’re very pretty,” I whisper. But I’m not really talking to her, more to myself. If I set my mind to it, I’m rather crafty – despite having done quite poor in visual arts courses in the past.

I roll out the white dough and choose a soft pink hue to make the slit nose. I imagine her nose twitching and I decide to make her feisty, like our Lacey, the bunny I’ve modeled her after. She’s our second born. And she’s an English Spot who likes to shark out, lifting only one ear in warning – “Stay out of my warren, human!”

I roll the clay until my hands feel fuzzy and reek of pastels. I spend the next twenty-nine minutes rolling tiny spots onto her white back. The pièce de résistance comes when I add the three brown freckles to her right cheek. I am tempted to show her off as I did Emerald, but I fight the urge. Instead, I pick the bunnies up and cart them out into the hall. I call out to him as I descend the stairs.

“Baby,” I announce, “If you smell smoke, come down quick because I’ve set the house alight.”

“All right,” he replies. And I smile.

I rearrange the shelves to ensure their ears aren’t squashed, and I place them inside. And I set the oven on bake. At fifteen minutes, the fumes choke me out as I retrieve them with my only pair of oven mitts. I set them on top of the stove. And as I wait for them to cool, I put the rest of the unused clay in bags to keep it fresh. I have more work to do still, and I wouldn’t want it to dry out.

When the girls are firm and cold to the touch, I return them to my desk. I take pictures of my creations with my newest 8.0 Mega Pixel webcam. I set them up like a diorama, on a surface already littered with coffee cups. I take my first picture and realize the backdrop of cups looks like a surreal forest.

“Baby, come quick!” I shout.

My husband rushes inside, in a panic. "What is it?" he demands, frantically. To his dismay, there is no emergency; I’m just pointing gleefully at the bunnies and cups.

“I think I’ll create a diorama for them. I’ll call it the Playground of Imagination. What do you think?”

“Clever.”

I am clever. That’s why he married me: For my quick wit, my eccentricities, and my creativity. “That’s Magenta, the white one. And of course, Emerald. Don’t the cups look like a forest?”

“They were one, once.”

“It’s a Tim Hortons forest.”

“Cute. And later, for our American neighbors, Starbucks.”

“Good idea!” I exclaim, and then, seeing him gear up to rush back toward his computer: “Get this.” I hold Magenta up and speak. “Rabbits are the new cats!”

He doesn’t look amused. “They just said that?”

“No, I read that on Yahoo News the other day. Did you read it?” He shakes his head.

“Don’t worry, Baby. I’m not imagining they’re talking or anything. I’m not like that woman, from that movie, Miss Potter. The writer, you know, with the bunnies in jackets?”

“Beatrix.”

“Precisely – what was her last name again?”

“Are you kidding me?” When he sees I’m teasing him, he sighs. “Your knowledge of your choice profession is frighteningly poor. What about reading more? Or even just looking through my Encyclopedia, there is a whole fourteen pages on the history of literature you could peruse.”

“Later,” I mutter, studying the bunnies again. There is a flaw on Magenta. She looks like an albino deer. “Does Magenta look like a doe?”

“I prefer the name Magenta.”

“No, doe a deer, a female deer; ray a drop of golden sun...”

“What are you going to do when faced with literary giants at the Pulitzer Prize? Disguise the fact that you haven’t a clue who Toni Morrison is?”

“I intend to learn when I’m on the brink of being famous.”

“And when will that be?”

“When I’ve made enough muses. Do you think I should make the tree, too? You know, the one they die near?”

“Besides playing with them in the... the...”

“Playground of Imagination,” I beam. “I plan on having the name trademarked. Maybe sell action figures. Duplicates – I can’t very well create them all by hand. But you know, like enlist Mattel’s help or something. They can roll them out as a set: The next “It” toys for children – future magic-realism readers.”

“Yes, besides playing with them in the playground of imagination...”

“Capitalize, Baby. Very important.”

“I did.”

I eye him suspiciously. “And obviously when my work is garnering a great deal of attention and my novels reach critical acclaim, I can sell them on E-bay for a tidy profit.” I pick up Emerald and tip her upside down. “See, I signed her. I plan to magic-marker on the actual signature later, but for now they’re engraved. Neat, huh?”

“How many hours did you spend doing this?”

“Well, Emerald took four hours. But I had to search for silhouettes of rabbits on Google Images and then reference the color of her coat in six different photo albums, and gauge her ears from various eras: infancy, childhood, and recently her transition to adulthood when her ears were in that iffy phase of being longer than her body but then her body grew and they looked like they shrunk. Did you see how I made Emerald stand like her too? She’s doing that kangaroo pose!”

“Cute.”

“Do you really think this is cute?”

“It is. And Lacey?”

“Her name is Magenta.”

“Yeah, the albino deer.”

“An hour ... But I might want to do a second mock-up of her. She’s looking like the Bambi that Disney forgot to color.”

“And how many more do you plan to make?”

I hold up my fingers. “One, two ... four ... eight ... maybe fifteen: half a dozen humans, two more rabbits, a dog, a tree, maybe a moon, a pair of Siamese twins, and a decapitated budgie.”

“And how many pages have you written today?”

“None – yet! But don’t worry, Baby. Maybe next week I’ll be more productive.”