The Easter Bunny

Competition entry

Everyone loved the Easter Bunny. "What a fine little chap" they would say as he busied himself hiding eggs in gardens and back yards across the land.
He was so popular that he had songs and poems written about him. His face had appeared on high value postage stamps in Finland, he was a close friend of the King of Spain, and had been voted 'Best loved personality' every year for fifteen years running by the Chocolate Manufacturers Guild.

Yes, everyone loved the Easter Bunny - except for the chickens. They hated him.

As far as the chickens were concerned eggs were their business, and the Easter Bunny - cute and fluffy as he may be - had no right to muscle in on their territory. If anyone was going to hide eggs it should be them. Rabbits and eggs indeed! The idea was absurd.

And so the chickens started a campaign to remove the Easter Bunny.

To be fair to the chickens, they did have a good argument, and it was logical that egg- laying poultry had more claim on egg related issues than non egg-laying rodents. They made such a fuss that in the end they were given sole rights to worldwide egg secretion, and as a result the Easter Bunny found himself out of a job.

This made the Easter Bunny very sad. He had been hiding eggs for all of his life, as had his father and grandfather before him. He didn't know how to do anything else.
They sent him to school to learn how to become a missing sock retriever, but his heart wasn't in it. While the teacher was talking about the importance of sock shade and under-bed safety procedures, Bunny would be staring out of the window day-dreaming of hiding eggs behind trees. Some might say that he should of moved on and forgotten all about eggs but he couldn't do so. The thought of an egg-less life was unbearable to him.

He began to sneak into supermarkets and take the eggs from the shelf and hide them under the frozen pizzas and behind the rolls of toilet paper. In the evening he would creep undetected into restaurants and cafes and move the eggs from the fridge and put them into the pockets of people's coats. And when people put their hands into their coat pockets if they weren't very careful their hands would end up covered in runny egg.

People didn't want runny egg all over their hands and they complained to the Police who came and arrested the Easter Bunny just as he was slipping a light-brown speckled egg into the side pocket of a lady's jacket.

He was bought before the magistrate and found guilty of unlawful egg rearrangement and sent to prison. And the magistrate told him that if he did anything naughty again it would be rabbit stew time. And for a rabbit this was dire news indeed.

The thing about Easter is that it arrives all of a sudden without you expecting it. A bit like the 6th Panzer Grenadier Division. It certainly caught the chickens off guard. They had not thought out the logistics of hiding eggs and had not realized that their lack of paws prevented them from transporting them. And once the eggs had been laid the chickens did what chickens do and sat on them. Unlike other years when you had to search really hard to find hidden eggs in your garden, now all you needed to do was locate a chicken and lift it up and underneath you would find the eggs. And as chickens because of their size were easier to spot than eggs, things became too easy and a lot of the fun went out of it. And people became disheartened. What had once been a mildly interesting afternoon now became a dull ten minutes.

The chickens were not very happy either. Every five minutes someone would be lifting them up and peering underneath them. I mean, how would you like it? There you are sitting nice and quiet when all of a sudden someone grabs you by the throat, lifts you up and either takes away what you were sitting on or looks up your bottom!

Chickens are rarely happy at the best of times, and now they demanded that the Easter Bunny be released from prison and given his old job back. And they clucked and moaned until the magistrate agreed.

Now rabbits aren't just good at hiding eggs, they are good at other things as well, and when the magistrate opened the door of the prison cell he saw that it was empty, for the Easter Bunny had dug a rabbit hole in the floor and was at that very moment tunneling his way to freedom. The temptation to get outside and start hiding eggs had simply been too great for him.

"Come back" shouted the magistrate down the rabbit hole "I'm going to let you out of prison".

The Easter Bunny heard him but knew that trying to escape from prison was a very serious crime and he didn't know if the magistrate was trying to catch him again and he didn't want to be served up as someone's dinner so he kept burrowing away until he emerged not very far from your back garden.

This Easter he'll be back hiding eggs in gardens and back yards across the land, but you'll never see him. He is careful now and no longer trusts what people say, and he's afraid of the stew pot.   

Reviews

[BooKrazy]

wow! nice story. I read this to my younger sister and she absolutely loved it. you certainly do have a very creative mind. I did find some grammatical errors though. Other than that, the story was perfectly good. Rock On!!
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[Churchmouse]

Thank you very much for your kind words and I'm very pleased that it worked for your younger sister. Grammar always has been and still is a weakness of mine and I'm very lucky to know some other writers who will tidy up the 'technical' side of things before I submit anything to anywhere important.

[s.narangoda]

It was certainly enjoyable, and quite interesting actually. I find how the animals have been anthropomorphised and placed in comical situations quite humorous. And just in time for Easter! All in all a wonderful piece of writing.

[Churchmouse]

Thank you very much for the comment and I'm sorry that I couldn't reply before as the day-job has prevented me from catching up on things.
Did you do a re-write on your murder story? I would be interested to re-read it.

[Bushra Naqshbandi]

A splendid story! It was such a great read. :)

[Churchmouse]

Thank you very much. It's very kind of you to say so and very good for the moral. I wrote this a few years ago and posted it on another site (which sadly no longer exists) so I thought I would dig it out.
Strange how if you leave a piece of work for a while and then come back to it you only then see the errors. I think in total I must have re-wrote it at least four times.