Work Text:
The newsroom kept its own weather.
Outside, Prague wore late-summer heat like a wool coat—sticky, impatient, smelling of tram brakes and river water—while inside the building the air was always a few degrees cooler, cut with ink, hot metal, and the faint sourness of old cigarettes ground into windowsills. Pages moved through hands like bread dough: pressed, flipped, proofread, pressed again. A teletype machine in the corner spat out foreign headlines in a nervous stutter, as if it could feel the eyes on it whenever a name like America appeared.
On Tuesdays, the children’s page was Lenka’s responsibility.
Not because she was childish—she was not—but because the children’s page had a kind of invisible license. It could be funny without being accused of mockery. It could be curious without being accused of hunger. It could speak in metaphors and get away with it, because adults liked to pretend metaphors were for children.
Lenka Šafránková sat at her desk with a pencil behind her ear and a stack of rejected ideas. A poem about the first day of school that felt too sweet. A short piece on apples that felt like propaganda for autumn. A cartoon about a fox that had somehow offended three different departments, though nobody could quite say how.
“Anything alive?” her editor called, not looking up from his own pile of paper.
“Everything is alive,” Lenka said automatically, then sighed. “Nothing is breathing.”
Her editor, Marek, made a sound like a laugh that had been trained to stay small. He lifted his chin toward the teletype. “The world is breathing. Steal its air.”
Lenka rolled her chair closer to the machine and waited for it to cough up something she could use. Foreign stories came in as if through thick glass—blurred, delayed, filtered by other hands before hers—but sometimes a detail survived intact. A singer spotted in a crowd. A storm that knocked down a bridge. A train derailment. The kind of facts that didn’t ask permission.
The teletype clattered.
CANDIDATES TOUR MIDWEST—CAMPAIGN MASCOT DRAWS CROWDS—
Lenka leaned in, expecting the rest to dissolve into policy and slogans. But the word rabbit stayed on the page like a thumbprint. She read the line again, then again, feeling something loosen in her chest—something almost like laughter.
A rabbit.
Of all the symbols America could offer—cars like living rooms, flags like curtains, voices amplified until they became weather—here was a rabbit, held against a woman’s blouse as if the whole frantic country could be steadied by a small warm body that did not care about speeches.
Marek drifted over behind her, reading over her shoulder. “A rabbit,” he said. His eyebrows lifted with the careful interest of a man trying not to be interested in the wrong thing.
“A rabbit,” Lenka repeated, and heard something in her own voice—a little spark.
“You’re smiling,” Marek observed.
“I’m thinking,” Lenka corrected, but she didn’t erase the smile.
She didn’t have to imagine the photograph; she could see it in her mind already. A candidate with earnest eyes, tired hair, sleeves rolled up. The rabbit tucked under her arm like a secret. A small absurd tenderness smuggled into the machinery of power.
Lenka’s pencil began to move without asking.
A title came first, like a door opening:
SNĚHOVÁ KULIČKA PÍŠE DOMŮ
Snowball Writes Home
Then, beneath it, a line that made her laugh quietly into her palm, as if the rabbit itself had leaned close to whisper it:
Milí čtenáři,
Dear readers,
Lenka stopped. She looked around the newsroom, half expecting someone to snatch the page from her hands. But the room was busy with its own urgency. Nobody cared yet what she was making, because it was still only paper.
She took her draft to Marek before she could talk herself out of it.
He read in silence, one finger tracing the lines as if checking for traps. His face stayed mostly still, but Lenka saw it—the minute softening around his eyes when he reached the part where the rabbit complained about microphones.
“What is this?” he asked.
“A column,” Lenka said. “Weekly. From a rabbit’s perspective.”
Marek blinked. “A rabbit’s—”
“Snowball,” Lenka said, tapping the teletype strip. “The candidate has a rabbit.”
“And the rabbit is… our correspondent?”
Lenka lifted her shoulders in a small shrug that meant Why not? and also Please don’t make me beg.
Marek read again, slower. The piece was short, but it had a rhythm: gentle jokes, bright observations, a softness that didn’t apologize for itself. It made America feel enormous and strange without making it monstrous. It made it human by refusing to pretend humans were the only creatures worth hearing from.
At the end, Snowball signed off:
Váš králík v zemi velkých bot a ještě větších hlasů,
Your rabbit in the land of big boots and even bigger voices,
Snowball.
Marek looked up. He kept his expression neutral the way men in his position were trained to, but his voice had warmed. “Children will love it.”
“Adults will pretend they’re reading it for the children,” Lenka said.
Marek’s mouth twitched. “Exactly.”
He set the paper down and rubbed the bridge of his nose. For a moment he looked older than he was.
“Don’t be clever,” he warned quietly. “Be… light.”
“I can be light,” Lenka promised.
He nodded once. “Run it on Saturday.”
And just like that, the rabbit entered the city.
---
On Saturday morning, the paper appeared in kiosks with the usual smell of fresh ink and damp newsprint, stacked beside cigarettes and chewing gum and small jars of pickles. The front page carried the heavy things: speeches, statistics, the careful language of certainty. But tucked inside, on the children’s page, was a new box of text with a simple illustration of a rabbit drawn in quick lines, ears perked, eyes bright.
Children found it first, because children always find the things meant for them. A boy on the tram read it aloud to his sister, stumbling over the foreign names but nailing the part where Snowball described television cameras as “large one-eyed predators that never blink.” The sister giggled so hard she snorted, and their mother—trying to look annoyed—leaned closer anyway.
In a kitchen where the tablecloth smelled faintly of vinegar, a grandmother clipped the column out and smoothed it flat with her palm. She told herself she was saving it for her grandson. Then she read it twice before he came home from school.
At Lenka’s office, letters began arriving by the second week.
They were addressed in careful child handwriting:
PRO KRÁLÍKA SNĚHOVOU KULIČKU
For Snowball the Rabbit Snowball
Inside were drawings: Snowball wearing a tiny hat. Snowball riding a train. Snowball in a debate, sitting at a podium while two men yelled at each other below.
There were questions too, earnest and practical.
Does America have the same carrots?
Is it true their houses have two floors?
Does the rabbit get scared when the humans shout?
Does Miss Jennifer share her food with her?
Lenka answered many of them in the column itself, letting Snowball respond with the patient amusement of a creature who lived among humans but did not belong to their panic.
Dear Jana, Snowball wrote one week. Carrots are carrots everywhere. Humans complicate them by putting them in cans.
Lenka kept her tone bright, but she learned quickly what the column was becoming.
It wasn’t simply an export of America into Czechoslovak kitchens. It was a mirror, turned at an angle where you could see both places at once without being told you were looking.
Snowball noticed things about America that adults were hungry to hear, because a rabbit was allowed to be blunt.
Snowball commented on supermarket aisles that seemed to go on forever like corridors of abundance.
There is a whole wall of cereal, Snowball wrote. So many boxes shouting different promises. I cannot read, but I can smell the sugar from across the store. The humans stand there, frozen, as if choosing breakfast is a moral test.
Children laughed at that, picturing grown-ups overwhelmed by cereal.
Adults laughed too, but differently, recognizing the peculiar sadness in too many choices.
Snowball described campaign rallies as storms of sound.
Sometimes the humans clap as if they are trying to scare away invisible birds. They raise signs and wave them like leaves in a strong wind. I do not understand why they do this. The woman I live with listens with her shoulders, not her hands. She smiles at people the way you smile at a nervous animal—slowly, so they don’t bolt.
Snowball noticed the strange intimacy of strangers touching the candidate’s sleeve, as if touching her could make their lives lighter.
Snowball noticed the way television flattened everything into spectacle.
Snowball noticed the way people talked about “freedom” as if it were a piece of furniture everyone owned, even when their faces looked tired with debt and fear.
And because it was a rabbit saying these things, it was considered—officially—whimsical.
Unofficially, it was being passed from hand to hand like a small sanctioned rebellion.
By October, the column had its own gravity. Children collected it like stamps. Adults began showing up early at kiosks, pretending they were buying the paper for other reasons. Marek’s editorials about industrial output went unread, while a rabbit’s musings on American sidewalks became dinner-table conversation.
Lenka began to feel the rabbit watching her from the page as she wrote, as if the act of giving Snowball a voice was now giving her permission to speak with more honesty than her own name could manage.
---
In America, the campaign moved like a traveling circus, except nobody admitted it was entertainment.
Lenka followed it through foreign dispatches and blurred photographs. She built Snowball’s world from fragments: a mention of a rally in Cleveland, a snapshot of Jennifer in a diner, a line about debates on television, the phrase “Midwest tour” repeated like a drumbeat.
She imagined Snowball in the back of a car, in a padded basket, hay shifting with every turn. She imagined the rabbit’s ears catching every strange sound: horns, helicopters, crowds chanting like one creature with many mouths.
In the column, Snowball spoke of America’s distances with the astonishment of a creature who measured the world by leaps.
We traveled so far the road changed its taste, Snowball wrote. Sometimes the air smells like metal. Sometimes it smells like cows. Sometimes it smells like nothing at all, which makes me nervous, because nothing is never truly nothing.
Lenka’s own country knew something about nothing that wasn’t nothing. She knew her readers knew it too. That was the magic of the rabbit: it could speak about emptiness without naming it.
Snowball described hotels.
The humans sleep in rooms that forget them immediately. Carpet that holds no scent. Sheets that pretend no one has ever been afraid in them. I prefer places with corners that remember.
That week, letters arrived from adults as well as children—careful handwriting, polite, sometimes anonymous.
Thank you for the rabbit, one note said simply.
Lenka kept those letters in a drawer beneath her notebooks.
She wrote Snowball into small domestic moments amid the campaign chaos: Jennifer pressing her forehead to the rabbit’s fur for one second of quiet. A volunteer offering Snowball a piece of apple, then apologizing as if the rabbit were a dignitary. A child at a rally staring at Snowball more than at the flags.
Children understand scale, Snowball wrote. They see me, and then they see the woman holding me, and they understand that if she can be gentle with a rabbit, she can be gentle with the world. Adults forget this and must be reminded.
There were weeks Lenka had to fight to keep the column on the page. Someone in a higher office questioned whether it was “appropriate” to devote so much attention to American politics, even filtered through a rabbit. Marek argued—calmly, convincingly—that it was cultural curiosity, harmless, even educational. A rabbit, after all, could not be accused of ideology.
Lenka wrote even more carefully after that, making Snowball sweeter, funnier, impossible to pin down. But the subtext did not vanish. It simply learned how to hop.
Then came November.
Even the newsroom felt it, despite the ocean between. The teletype’s chatter grew sharper. Headlines arrived faster. Editors spoke in more urgent whispers. The foreign desk began to smell of strong coffee and stress.
Election night was not their night, but it seeped into their city anyway, because people are always hungry for turning points, even when they belong to someone else.
Lenka sat alone at her desk late, the building nearly empty, reading the dispatches as they came.
Numbers. Projections. States like unfamiliar animals. Commentary. Speculation.
She kept looking for a mention of the rabbit, as if Snowball’s small presence might make the whole thing bearable.
It didn’t.
One morning, Marek came in with his coat still on, hair damp from cold mist, and said quietly, “She lost.”
Lenka stared at him. “Are you sure?”
He nodded, rubbing his hands together. “It’s done.”
Lenka looked down at her notes for that week’s column—half-finished jokes, a scene where Snowball complained about confetti in his whiskers. Suddenly it all felt too small.
But then she thought: Small is exactly what survives.
She picked up her pencil.
---
Dear readers, the column began, the humans have a word: “concession.” It means they stop pretending they can control the future. Jennifer stood in front of bright lights and said thank you to people who looked like they were trying not to cry. Then she came back to the quiet room, sat on the floor, and let me climb into her lap. Jennifer did not say anything for a long time. I licked the salt from her thumb. I think this is what humans do when they want to stay alive.
Children reading it felt a lump in their throats without quite understanding why.
Adults reading it felt something else: the recognition of dignity when it is not rewarded.
Letters flooded in.
Some were fiercely loyal, as if the rabbit’s candidate had become their candidate, too.
Tell her we were with her, one said, signed only with initials.
Tell Snowball to keep writing, a child demanded, as if the rabbit’s voice could prevent endings.
Marek approached Lenka’s desk that Monday with an unfamiliar look—almost cautious.
“You don’t have to stop,” he said.
Lenka blinked. “Stop what?”
“The column,” Marek said. “It was tied to the election, technically. But…” He gestured helplessly toward the piles of letters. “The rabbit has an audience.”
Lenka’s throat tightened unexpectedly. “Snowball has a life,” she said softly.
Marek nodded. “Then let her live.”
So Snowball stayed.
And in staying, the column became something else entirely.
No longer just a window into America’s election circus, it became a weekly serial of observation: America as seen from the floor, from behind furniture legs, from the quiet places humans forgot to look.
Snowball wrote about winter.
In Geneva, the snow is honest, she wrote one December. It does not pretend to be clean. It carries footprints and soot and the shadow of trees. Jennifer opens the door and breathes like she is tasting it. She says, “Alright,” to the cold, the way you speak to a stubborn friend.
Snowball wrote about ordinary mornings.
The humans drink coffee like it is medicine, she observed. They stand at the window and stare into the distance, as if expecting something to arrive on the horizon. I do not understand this. If something is coming, you will smell it first.
Snowball wrote about music without naming it as politics.
Sometimes Jennifer sings in the kitchen, he confessed. Not for crowds. Not for cameras. Just for the kettle. When she sings, the air changes. Even the dust seems to stop moving. I sit very still, because I think sound can be frightened away.
In Czechoslovakia, people began reading Snowball not just for America, but for the feeling behind it: a steady affection for small truths, a refusal to treat tenderness as weakness.
The rabbit became a kind of unofficial citizen, stamped into the week like a holiday that no one had voted for.
Children began addressing their own problems to him.
Snowball, my father is angry all the time. Do rabbits get angry?
Snowball, I am afraid of the dark. What do you do when you are afraid?
Snowball, do you think humans can change?
Lenka answered in Snowball’s voice with careful humility.
Dear Petr, one column read, rabbits are mostly afraid. We do not have time for anger. But humans have long lives, and they fill them with many feelings. Sometimes anger is only fear wearing boots.
Marek read that one twice and said nothing, but his eyes had gone distant, as if the rabbit had named something he had never allowed himself to say aloud.
---
The photographs arrived in late spring, two years into the column’s life.
They came not through official channels, not stamped with any authority, but in a plain envelope that looked as if it had traveled through many hands before finding the right desk. The return address was handwritten, neat, American.
Lenka held it for a long moment before opening it, the way you hold something you’re afraid might dissolve.
Inside was a letter and a stack of small glossy prints.
The letter was short, written in careful strokes, the kind of handwriting that suggested patience.
Jennifer had heard—somehow, through some human chain of coincidence and kindness. She wrote that she laughed, that she was touched, that Snowball did not understand, of course, but that she had explained to her that she had friends in her old home.
And then Jennifer sent photographs.
Snowball on a porch step, ears upright, looking directly at the camera with the serious curiosity of someone who has been told she is important.
Snowball in a patch of dandelions, the yellow heads towering over her like a forest.
Snowball beside a kitchen chair, as if waiting politely for the meeting to begin.
Snowball in winter, nose dusted with a little snow.
On the back of each print, Jennifer had written a brief caption—dates, small jokes, the kind of mundane intimacy that made Lenka’s chest ache.
Snowball inspecting the first tomatoes.
Snowball does not approve of my knitting.
Snowball believes she can outrun the wind. (She cannot).
Lenka covered her mouth with her hand, eyes stinging unexpectedly. She wasn’t naive; she knew this was just a rabbit and some paper and a letter. But it also felt like proof that the column had reached beyond the newsroom, beyond the borders of what was “allowed,” into actual life.
Marek came to her desk and found her staring at the photographs like they were relics.
“Well?” he asked.
Lenka slid one across to him.
He picked it up, studied Snowball’s small form against the rough porch wood, and something softened in his posture. “She’s real,” he said, as if he hadn’t quite believed until that moment.
“She’s always been real,” Lenka murmured.
Marek cleared his throat, as if emotion were dust he needed to cough away. “Run them,” he said. “All of them. A special issue.”
Lenka nodded, still blinking fast.
That Saturday, the children’s page became a shrine to a rabbit.
The photographs printed in grainy black-and-white, the captions translated with care. Snowball’s weekly column accompanied them, and for the first time, Lenka let the rabbit address his readers with a kind of startled gratitude.
Dear friends, Snowball wrote, I have been told that you have imagined me for a long time. I did not know this was possible. I thought imagination was only for carrots you have not yet found. But humans are strange and wonderful. They can love a creature they have never touched. Jennifer says this is important and I believe her.
Kiosks sold out early.
Children carried the paper folded under their arms like treasure.
Adults tucked it into briefcases, into coat pockets, into the spaces of their lives where softness was usually not permitted.
For a week, in that city of careful silences, people smiled at strangers over a rabbit.
---
The column ran for years.
It outlasted the election that had birthed it. It outlasted the novelty of America. It outlasted the skepticism of those who had assumed a rabbit’s voice would eventually become boring.
It didn’t, because Lenka never let Snowball become a mascot.
She kept him as what she was: a witness.
Snowball watched America change in small ways—new slogans, new anxieties, the endless churn of headlines—but she remained interested in the ground-level truths.
She wrote about children he met on sidewalks, how they offered her clover without being asked.
She wrote about veterans who sat quietly at the edges of events, hands folded like they were holding something invisible.
She wrote about a town by a lake that smelled of steel and freshwater, where Jennifer stood in grocery store aisles choosing apples like it mattered, Snowball always liked green ones best.
And always, he wrote about humans as creatures of contradiction: capable of cruelty and astonishing gentleness in the same afternoon.
Lenka grew older with the column. She began to notice that she was not only writing as Snowball, but writing through her—allowing Lenka to say what she might have been too cautious to say under her own name.
Sometimes, on the hardest weeks, she would sit late at her desk and imagine Snowball’s warm body tucked against someone’s ribs, hear the small sound of chewing, the calm certainty of a creature who lived moment to moment.
She would write, and she would breathe again.
Marek kept a folder of clippings in his drawer—every Snowball column, neatly cut, dated, preserved. He never mentioned it, but Lenka saw it once when he opened the drawer for a stapler. The folder was thick as a book.
One day, three years after the column began, Marek said quietly, “You know they’re going to remember this.”
“Remember what?” Lenka asked.
He tapped the paper. “That tenderness was possible. That we were allowed to laugh. That we were allowed to feel something without being told what it meant.”
Lenka looked down at the latest column—Snowball complaining about the indignity of wearing a ribbon in a photograph Jennifer had sent, then admitting he tolerated it because it made children happy.
She smiled, small and tired and real. “It’s just a rabbit,” she said.
Marek’s gaze held hers. “Nothing that gets into people like this is just anything.”
---
When the column finally ended, it did not end with scandal or censorship or a dramatic farewell. It ended the way many things end: with the quiet shifting of time.
Lenka was assigned new duties. Marek was moved to another desk, another set of responsibilities. The newsroom changed its rhythm. New columns arrived. Old ones vanished. The rabbit’s box of text was replaced by something else—educational, clean, forgettable.
But people did not forget.
Years later, in apartments where the wallpaper had been replaced twice, the clippings still existed in drawers and between pages of books. Some were yellowed. Some were creased from being read and reread. Some had children’s handwriting on them—answers to Snowball’s questions, additions to Snowball’s world.
A grown woman once found her childhood scrapbook in a closet and sat on the floor, turning pages slowly, laughing at the drawings, then crying without warning at the column about concession and salt on a thumb.
A man on a tram saw a child holding a rabbit and, for a moment, smiled in a way that startled him.
And somewhere, far away, in a town by a lake, Snowball lived out his small rabbit life without ever understanding the shape of what he had become: a bridge made of ink and humor and soft fur, spanning an ocean and a decade, connecting strangers who needed, for a time, to hear the world described by someone who did not crave power.
In the end, that was all Lenka had ever really wanted.
Not to report.
Not to persuade.
Just to remind her readers—children and adults both—that the world could be observed gently, and that gentleness itself could be a kind of courage.
And if a rabbit could carry that message across borders, week after week, then perhaps humans could learn to carry it too.