Maimane park was an odd place. A place of quiet and humble nature, flanked by ugly, dilapidated, industrial buildings.
Judy climbed up the mossy and ivy covered bridge, where she knew her tiny bunny frame could get the best view.
'Oh I tried, and it made things so much worse for so many innocent predators.'
Those words, her own words, haunted her. She remembered how strange they felt coming out of her mouth. 'Innocent' and 'predators.' For her whole life, predators were privileged, scary, mighty, perhaps even heroic...
But never 'innocent.'
"Nick? Nick?" she said, scampering from side to side. The park seemed empty.
Then she could hear something. It sounded like the slurping of a nearly empty drink. Could it be? She crawled her way over the stone 'guard rail' to look right down the edge.
"Oh, Nick!" she cried. In same shirt as when they had met, he was wearing turtle-shell sunglasses and sipping from a large styrofoam cup, sitting on a lawn chair with his feet propped on a bucket.
Finally reuniting with her scorned friend, she briskly scampered down from the bridge. She had no idea how this was going to go, but things could only get better from here.
"Night howlers aren't wolves! They're toxic flowers! I think someone's targeting predators on purpose and making them go savage!"
The vulpine put down his drink. Judy stopped breathing, wondering for a suspenseful moment what he would say. She had not really made a prediction.
"Wow," was his response, heavy and sardonic. He rose from his seat, took off his sunglasses and put them on his footrest. "Isn't that interesting..."
Judy was taken aback. She should not have expected this to be simple, but...what had she expected?
He was walking, slow and gloomy, into the underside of the bridge.
"Wait, wait!" she dashed after him. "Please I - I know you'll never forgive me! And I don't blame you!"
She had gone from being apologized to by a fox, to begging for one's forgiveness. Their respective incidents were fifteen years apart. Was it because the country had changed? Much in the way she had been trying to change it?
"I wouldn't forgive me either."
The fox, ancient enemy of bunnies, stopped, looking out into the sunlit, green park from the cover of the stone structure. "I was ignorant, and irresponsible, and small minded." She was so focused on her own, selfish social justice crusade, she had ignored bigotry right under her own, tiny nose.
Still silence.
"But predators shouldn't suffer because of my mistakes."
'Predators.' 'Suffer.' Those two words also felt odd together. For almost her whole life, she had only really thought about the injustices suffered by her own kind: the prey, especially small prey. Predators, at least large predators, had been as invulnerable as the days they stalked the jungle.
"I have to fix this." The rabbit could feel her eyes starting to burn.
"But I can't do it without you."
Her voice cracked, ever so slightly. She had kept a stiff upper lip in front of bullies, in front of her most harsh superiors, but she could not keep it below the weight of her own mistakes.
"And...and after we're done," the last word coming out as a weak breath. "You can hate me."
She closed her eyes hard, squeezing out tears. "And that'll be fine. Because I was a horrible friend. And I hurt you. And you - and you can walk away knowing that you were right all along."
She took a deep breath. The 'bigots' of her childhood were right, and thus so too were the 'bigots' of old. "I really am just a dumb bunny!"