Challenge #00707 - A342: Honey-Bunny Booboo
A window into the daily life of a mixed family roughly one generation after “The Invasion of the Rabbit Women!”.
[AN: For those too busy to scroll through their dash or my blog, that’s this post here: the-hunt-begins ]
A century following the invasion and colonisation of Sol, much had changed. Most of those changes were completely lost on Tirena, age six. She had a happy home, and the best parents and siblings.
Tirena had been flipping channels on the holovision and stopped because the viewer was showing two-D monochrome pictures. The presenter was talking about a king named Martin Luther.
She was so enraptured that she sat still enough for one of her bun-sisters to plait her hair up into mock-ears.
There was even footage of him speaking. “I have a dream…”
Tirena listened to the nice words and let her baby sibs, human and bun alike, occupy her lap. It was a very good dream that came true like that.
And then she found out that some people shot him. And killed him. For no real good reason.
There was only one person to make the scary things go away. “MAMA!”
Both parents came running. “What is it, Honey-bunny Booboo?” Daddy cooed, automatically landing in a hug. “You okay?”
“Why’d they kill the man,” Tirena pointed at the holovision. “He didn’t do anything mean…”
Mama, a big beautiful bunny-lady, took Tirena up in her strong arms and hugged her and kissed her and snoodled her, which tickled Tirena almost into giggles. “Oh, sweet baby child… Your people’s history is full of mean, mean things.”
Daddy, lots shorter than Mama, reached up to pat Tirena on her back. “Once upon a time, humans like you and I used to judge people on all sorts of silly criteria. Who they loved, how they loved, the way they presented themselves and even skin colour and gender expression.”
“Why?”
“Because of a big bad book that told people that being true to themselves was evil. Lots of people followed the words of that book, but didn’t pay any attention to the lessons it was trying to teach.”
Tirena tried to fit that description into her world. “You mean like that man on the street corner who calls Mama a ‘false god’?”
“A lot like him, yes.”
“How’d they get anything done if everything was evil?”
“A lot of the time, they didn’t,” soothed Mama. She took Tirena into the big snuggle couch and everyone huddle-cuddled up to feel den-safe. “When my people came along, there were men who wanted to kill women who didn’t want to have babies. And there were people who didn’t want other people to raise unwanted babies.”
“They didn’t have the Uterus Machines, then,” explained Daddy. “And many men viewed in-body gestation as a punishment, too.”
“There were all kinds of immoral moralists,” sighed Mama. “And silly people who said and did very silly things.”
“Most of them are gone, now,” soothed Daddy. “But it’s important that we know they were there, in their time. Context in history is everything. The pale-skin people in charge thought Mr King was a threat because he didn’t like the way they bossed around brown-skin people like us.”
“Pale-skins picked on brown-skins?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“That’s deeper history. The pale-skin people were very lucky at the right time and place and practically took over the world. They thought it was because their god wanted them to be in charge. So they picked on everyone who wasn’t a pale-skin.”
“That’s silly,” announced Tirena. “That’d be like picking on my baby sibs because they got spots in their fur.”
“Exactly. Very silly.”
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