The Rabbit Back Literature Society Read Online Free PDF Page B

when you looked at it up close and turned it in the light, you could see its features in detail. Atfirst Ella had found it hard to believe that it had been made by her mother, a woman who, like most people, normally made mashed potatoes, socks and lingonberry jam, not art.
    The local ceramicists for the most part produced water sprites, pixies, elves, and gnomes. Laura White had made these creatures popular all over the world through her children’s books, but in Rabbit Back in particular you ran into them everywhere you looked. They were presented as prizes in raffles, given as presents, brought to dinner as hostess gifts. There was only one florist in Rabbit Back, but there were seven shops that sold mostly mythological figurines.
    Ella thought the statues were tasteless and depressing. She had asked her mother what had possessed her to go to the art club and why her first and last project there would have been a gnome, of all things. Her mother had said something about how the idea had just popped into her head in the garden while she was digging the carrot bed.
    She’d had her hands in the dirt up to the wrists and had gradually found herself falling into a kind of stupor. She completely forgot what she was doing and noticed that she was thinking about a gnome. She started to feel faint and dizzy, and had some difficulty getting back to the house to lie down.
    “It made me worry that I was going to turn out like your father,” she said. “That there was something wrong with my head. Some brain malfunction. That gnome stayed in my mind, haunting me, and I had to get it out somehow. So I thought I’d try art, since I had a couple of friends in the club.”
    Page three of
Rabbit Tracks
advertised a “mythological mapper”. It was the newest fad. ORDER NOW! MYTHOLOGICAL MAPPING FOR YOU OR A FRIEND! The service included anexplanation of all the mythological creatures occupying your property. According to the ad, it cost eighty euros, and could be ordered through the Rabbit Back Mythological Heritage Society.
    Every fourth issue of
Rabbit Tracks
included a pull-out literary supplement, with the pithy name
Ten
. Ella read the current supplement. She hadn’t called the editor to withdraw her submission . Her story had been published on page five.
    The supplement published local amateur writers. Rabbit Back boasted not only Laura White and her protégés but also a large contingent of amateur authors. The town was known to have no less than six writers’ associations, and that was without counting the most noteworthy writers’ association, the Rabbit Back Literature Society, which accepted members only at Laura White’s invitation. The possibility of joining the Society was practically theoretical, since the entire present membership—nine lifetime member authors—had all joined in the first three years after the Society was established in 1968.
    It was said that Laura White had been asked how many writers she imagined she would find in a place like Rabbit Back. At the time, the Society had only been in existence for four years, and none of its members had yet been published.
    Laura White had held up the fingers of both hands. So the answer
might
be “ten”, which was the preferred interpretation —that the authoress intended to discover and train ten new Rabbit Back writers in total. Of course she may have just been raising her hands to fend off the question. In any case, the literary supplement had taken its name from the incident.
    The story was Ella Milana’s first published work of fiction. It had a complicated, lovely title: “The Skeleton Sat in theCave Silently Smoking Cigarettes”. She’d found the theme for the story close by. It was about a young woman with faulty reproductive organs.
    Ella had once met Anna-Maija Seläntö, a member of the Rabbit Back Literature Society who now lived in Sweden. Seläntö had given a lecture at the university, and after the lecture Ella had asked the writer how it