Magical

　　I woke early. Phoneless, I had no idea what time it was, but when I unzipped the flap carefully, so as not to wake Uman, and poked my head out, a smoky just-after-dawn light seeped through the woods, turning the trees into charcoal sketches. All was quiet, except for the songs of unseen birds. Tired and just-woken grump as I was, the effect was calming.

　　A movement caught my eye. A few metres away, a family of rabbits loped about the clearing: two adults, browsing, and four young, play-fighting. I held my breath, kept dead still. For a moment, they carried on, oblivious to my presence, then one of the adults spotted me and all six scampered into the bracken, vanishing so quickly and so totally that I might've imagined them. Thirty seconds, a minute? But those rabbit were the most magical thing I'd ever seen.

　　I waited in the opening of the tent in the hope they'd come back. They didn't.

　　Never mind. I was still smiling inside at the sight of them. At how beautiful the woods looked, now that the darkness had been erased by the breaking of a new day.

Twenty Questions for Gloria, p139-140
Martin Bedford
ISBN 978-1-4063-6353-1