The Warren

I’m a big book person, so go figure, some of my earliest memories involve my mom reading to me at bedtime. It’s mostly the favorites that stand out – I was small even as a toddler, so I couldn’t get enough of The Little Engine That Could – but there was one that I didn’t really like, but my mom insisted on reading it to me anyway. It’s called The Runaway Bunny, by the same author and illustrator who did Goodnight Moon (another banger), and the story is incredibly simple: a baby bunny tells his mommy bunny that he wants to run away, naming the different things he’s going to magically transform into to escape – a sailboat on the waves, a flower in a garden – but every time she tells him that she’ll follow, turning herself into the wind or a gardener, until finally he gives up and goes to sleep. I liked the pictures, which whimsically depict the rabbits’ transformations, but the plot offended my child’s sense of logic: why would the baby want to run away from the snug burrow where he lives with his mommy?

Let me be clear: The Warren isn’t an adaptation of The Runaway Bunny – in fact it was an entry in this year’s Shufflecomp, based on two songs I’ve never heard of. You’re not a baby bunny here, but one who seems on the cusp of young adulthood, and you’ve got a rationale for wanting to leave your overprotective mother, who locks you in your tunnel every night behind a grating made from a lattice of hunters’ discarded arrows: you want to explore, to experience life outside the tunnels, to meet someone who might be unlike any other bunny you’ve ever known before – or just to be seen as an adult, an individual worthy of respect in the eyes of others.

The game presents itself in two short quartets of links, each of which reveals a possible consequence of slipping out one night in search of freedom – a warren of forking paths. And the rewards for your boldness are sweet:

"You’ve never been able to take time to appreciate the trees in full blossom, to savor ripe berries warmed by the sun, to simply exist and breathe the fresh air."

Or at least, they can be – for down another path:

"You know that a rabbit can never let their guard down, that you always have to have one ear fixed on any hint of possible danger. But you forget this just long enough for a cat’s jaws to clamp down on your leg."

For every positive future, there’s at least one other where your brashness brings you to ruin, all narrated in compact, evocative prose. You have no control about any of this, there are no clues in any of the links to prompt you about which lead to happiness and which to disaster, you just need to take your chances until you reach the final choice, wiser now about why your mother does what she does, but facing the same dilemma: play it safe, or take a risk? Stay home, or run away?

When my son was born, The Runaway Bunny was one of the first books we bought. It’s not one of his favorites, either, but I inflict it on him anyway. I think about my mom, who lives almost 3,000 miles away from me now, on the opposite side of the country; I wonder what she was hoping for when she read me that book, and I wonder what I’m hoping for, too.