Free Hare Moon by Carrie Ryan Page B

furiously through her body. Growing up, she was told that they are all that was left. That her village is home to the only survivors of the Return.
    She was told it is her sole and sacred duty to continue the path of humanity.
    “Quite a few of the villages are gone,” Patrick explains. “But there are enough left that we’ll survive.”
    Neither of them opens the gate between them, and as Tabitha walks home in the late afternoon, her thoughts run wild with the newly learned reality of her world. It’s as if she’s spent her life kneeling on the ground, staring at a rock, and suddenly she’s standing, staring at a field full of stones.
    She wonders what it would be like to fly. To see the entire world at once. She runs through the Forest, arms out, with fingers almost—but not quite—brushing the metal links of the old fences. She realizes that the world might be hers to know after all.

    They have agreed to meet at the same gate on the second afternoon after the full moon each month. Tabitha spends the between days lost in dreams. Her mother starts to scold her for burning dinner. Her younger brother skins his knee one day when she’s not paying attention. She barely remembers the words to the prayers she’s asked to recite at services.
    But she’s alive. And she wants to grab everyone around her and scream that there’s a world that’s more important than any of these daily toils. Yet she doesn’t say a word because she fears that they will lock the gates. Lock her from the path, and from Patrick.

    The next two times they meet, neither opens the gate. They stay on their respective sides and tell stories. She rolls onto her back on the path and stares up through the canopy of leaves and watches how the sun caresses each oneas Patrick tells her about his dreams.
    Sometimes she closes her eyes and wonders what it would be like to walk through the gate and run away with him. And sometimes she imagines bringing him home with her and claiming him as hers.
    At the end of their third meeting, he laces his fingers through the links of the gate and she laces her fingers through his and they sit that way for an afternoon, feeling each other’s pulse fighting.
    He brings her a gift at their next meeting: a worn book with pages as soft as feathers. She opens the gate to take it from him. She’s astonished at how small it is, how compact. The only books she’s ever seen are copies of the Scripture in her village, thick heavy tomes with paper like onionskin.
    “It’s my sister’s favorite,” he tells her. “I thought you might like it too.”
    She reads the little book three times before their next meeting, trying to understand what it means. It’s about a house and a woman and her husband, who, she discovers, may have drowned his first wife. It’s lush and dangerous and makes her body pound and pulse.
    “Why would a man be so cruel to his wives?” she asks Patrick after the next full moon.
    He looks at her with his head tilted. “It’s just a story,” he says. “It’s made up—fiction.”
    She nods but she’s frowning because she still doesn’t understand what that means, and he pulls her into his arms to ease her worries.
    In the winter she tells him about Brethlaw, the celebration of life and marriage at her village. He opens the gate and she walks through it and nowthey tangle together under blankets, surrounded by snow that floats through the air and melts against their skin.
    He traces his finger down her spine, weaving between her bones. “Would you leave your world for me?” he asks.
    “I might,” she tells him. She wonders how the world ever fell apart with this much love in it.

    Tabitha’s parents are unhappy with her. She’s not focusing, they tell her. They remind her that if she doesn’t find a husband soon she may be left with no option but to join the Sisterhood, like her friends Ruth and Ami. And while this might have been an effective threat in the past, she just bites back