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"into the pot he'll go." Although she'd never killed an animal in her life except mice, Aunt Etta loved rabbit stew. She said it reminded her of "her youth" growing up in Minnesota. I thought there must be better memories than that, even if my own childhood hadn't yet amounted to much. Still, four or five times a year, she paid the Mexicans to get her rabbits. They tended to be stringy things, marsh rabbits taken from the shores of nearby lakes.

    That night, as I lay there, so uncomfortable, staring out the window, listening to the sound of mosquitoes kissing the window screen, I heard a voice.
    "Let me out of my cage," it said, gruffly. "Let me out."
    I sat bolt upright in my bed, grabbed a plastic doll for protection. I listened carefully but heard nothing except my own breathing.
    After a minute, I lay back down, chest tight and heart devouring my blood.
    But a little later, the voice spoke again: "Please let me out of this cage, Rachel."
    This time when I sat up brandishing my doll, I dared look over at the cage. Sensio was staring at me, his white fur darkly glowing against the cross-cut shadows.
    "Was that you?" I whispered, almost hoping it had been, and not someone who had broken into our home. An absurd little part of me was almost more afraid of waking up Aunt Etta than of a talking rabbit.
    "Yes, it's me. Sensio."
    I couldn't see Sensio's mouth, but the sound definitely came from his cage.
    That's when I thought I must be asleep, and that the heat was giving me strange dreams. I would wake soon.
    In the meantime, it was the most natural thing in the world to climb down off my bed made for an adult and kneel down in front of the cage and say to Sensio, "If I let you out, will you go back in when I tell you?"
    Those eyes, so full and dark against the ghost-white of his face, saw me.
    "Yes, Rachel," Sensio said.
    Had I, in my loneliness, created a voice for Sensio? Something like this thought passed through me.
    Watching myself do it, I opened the cage, and even then it was as if I had opened more than just a cage. I flinched from the slight electrical discharge as the latch shocked me.
    But nothing odd happened afterwards, not really.
    Sensio hopped forward, snuffled against my knee, asked in a low, deep voice, "Do you have any lettuce? Any carrots?"
    Just like any rabbit.

    The photographer laughed weakly when he'd recovered his composure. He turned to me and pointed and said, standing straight again, a new cigarette held in one shaking hand, unlit: "Nice trick, kid. You should take that act out on the road." While Sensio stared up at him from his position as prisoner at the post.
    Aunt Etta became livid, all the cheer dropping from her face and a pink blush steadily moving up her face from her neck.
    "It was the rabbit, you idiot!" she shouted at him, her lipstick a ragged blood-snarl in the heat. "You heard it! You heard it speak! You heard it and you think she could do that? That stupid little kid?"
    The photographer stared at Aunt Etta much as he'd stared at Sensio. I was staring, too, but Aunt Etta hadn't really said anything I hadn't heard before.
    He worked much faster after that, and Sensio said nothing. Nothing at all. But from the look he gave me, I thought there was must be much more he wanted to say.

    At first, we talked mostly at night, when I thought Aunt Etta couldn't hear us. I'd forgotten the strange ways in which that old bungalow could carry sound, or I'd just decided to risk it. I can't remember.
    These weren't conversations like the ones between two people. For one thing, I sometimes still believed I'd made it all up and was talking to myself. For another, Sensio sometimes made sense and other times talked in riddles, or with some kind of veil between what I wanted him to mean and what he actually meant. I mimicked Aunt Etta's mutterings for a while around the cottage, but my favorite phrase was "Just the tip of the iceberg," to remind me of larger mysteries. My forehead became taut with the