The Fable of the Hare

The Home for Old Magicians doesn't take reservations. It doesn't advertise and it certainly doesn't let anyone leave. You arrive when the act breaks down-when the audience forgets your name but still claps for your trick. You arrive when the magic runs out or worse starts working on its own.Heather Caldwell arrives claiming she's there to study memory loss in the elderly. In truth she's searching for Joel: a stage magician with a charming grin a mysterious past and a habit of vanishing from her life without warning. He was last seen performing at a fundraiser for the Home. Since then no one remembers where he went-not even the staff. Not even Heather some days.As she settles into the strange rhythms of the manor-where time bends hares multiply and mirrors develop their own agendas-Heather realizes the Home isn't just a retirement community. It's a trap. And every story told inside it comes with a cost.The hares white and watching are more than pests. Some of them remember being men. Others are something far older. Heather's only allies are unreliable at best: a once-famous escape artist with a broken hip a nurse who may be a priestess and a boy made of vanishing acts. They teach her that in this house magic isn't a metaphor. It's a system of debts. And hers are coming due.As the seasons slip and twist Heather must reckon with her own history of deception discover who-or what-replaced Joel and learn what happens when the audience disappears and the trick keeps going anyway.The Fable of the Hare is a stand-alone entry in the Feast Tales for Famine Times series: a lush theatrical exploration of ancient justice recursive transformation and the hunger for narrative control. With echoes of Shirley Jackson Peter Straub and Angela Carter it invites the reader to step behind the curtain but warns: not every illusion ends when the show is over.For readers ages 12 to 112 who know that fables are warnings not wishes.