Ornamental rabbit on the ribs

Anselm was the best hand at the scriptorium of Saint Ebba's, which is to say he could make a capital D bloom like a rose in February. The prior gave him the Psalter for Lent and told him to keep his birds and beasts out of the psalms. Anselm promised. Then, on the third night, a hare sat down in the left margin of the Ninth Psalm, facing the gutter, its ears laid out in feathered scrolls, and its haunch filled with a little wheel of knots that seemed to turn when you looked at it too long.

The prior came at matins with his lamp and found the page nearly finished. He held it up to the flame and said nothing for so long that the candle guttered. Then he asked Anselm where the hare had come from. Anselm said it had been sitting in the cloister all winter, waiting for someone to notice it was not a psalm at all but a pattern that had slipped loose from the stone carvings. The prior said the hare could stay if it earned its keep, and so it did. It is still there, if you know where to look, the only creature in the Psalter that faces backwards.

Anselm died old and quiet, and the monks say the hare left the book the night he did and sat down in the orchard, its haunch glowing like a lantern. I have never seen it. But the Psalter is still in the chapter house, and when you turn to the Ninth, you will find the margin empty, and a faint dark line where something once sat, asking to be looked at.