John & the Ridiculous Hare

[Grey_Wolf]

Prologue

Once upon a time there was a little boy called John. John wasn’t very old, but unusually bright. He lived alone in a small house on top a sloping meadow. The meadow reached all the way down to the sea.
On the left, in a brush of low rosebushes and junipers, a witch lived in a red cottage. And on the right, where the meadow ended and the forest took over, a wizard lived in a tower of tin.
The wizard’s temper was unequalled. Sometimes he was very angry and sometimes only a little.. Sometimes he was very angry and sometimes just a little. When he was very angry, he was dangerous.
The witch was neither angry nor dangerous. She was, if anything, kind – at least towards John. John liked the witch very much. She used to tell him funny tales and stories when she wasn’t working with her secret experiments. The wizard also did experiments. Sometimes John saw a strange animal slip out of the tin tower. It was the wizard’s anteater.
John’s small house was very nice. It had a large white veranda, almost overgrown with wildwine. The wildwine climbled and twirled around the veranda railings and up along the corner pillars and along the gutter. And when the sun was shining, it made beautiful patterns upon the flowery seats of the whicker chairs.
John sat there often, scratching mosquito bites and meditating on the great problems and mysteries of life. He puckered his brow until he looked like a raisin in the face. Sometimes he didn’t think at all, and then he looked like a bun. Sometimes, when he meditated just a little, he looked like a raisin bun. But that’s not really true.
And now, if you promise that you won’t be as mean as you usually are, I will tell you about one of the times when John was interrupted in his thinking. And what happened after.