The Crime: One Puzzle Piece Missing (Suspect Found)
I am Azmi, writing from Meknes, and what follows is the true and ridiculous legend of the thousand-piece mountain, as it will be told in this flat for years to come. Gather close, for this is a tale of patience, of cardboard kingdoms, of a small grey suspect with no remorse and excellent teeth. Every word is true, especially the funny parts. The flat still remembers. The missing piece is still missing.
How the mountain came to the table
Once upon a winter evening there came to our flat a great box containing one thousand pieces, the first grand puzzle of my adult life, all misty hills and a castle I intended to conquer slowly across many quiet nights. I cleared the low table, laid out the edge pieces with ceremony, and worked the border while Leeloo watched from the rug with the deep stillness of a creature memorizing a map. For a week the mountain grew. Hills rose from nothing. The castle gained a tower. I photographed the progress nightly and forbade all fans and sudden movements near the table, and the flat observed my decrees with affectionate mockery.
Leeloo, I should tell you, had never once touched the puzzle, which in hindsight was clearly reconnaissance. She sniffed the box lid on day one and sneezed, a review I chose to interpret as indifference. She napped beneath the table most evenings, a warm loaf parked exactly under the castle section, and I found it charming rather than suspicious. Other keepers of chewy rabbits had warned me in their own diaries, including the famous evening chronicled in my game night with a card chewer, but I believed my table was safe because my rabbit was, in my expert opinion, an angel. The legend requires me to record that I was wrong, and that the angel had teeth.
The night the mountain lost a tooth
The crime itself happened in the smallest possible window, as the best legends insist. I rose to answer the door for a delivery, gone perhaps ninety seconds, and returned to find Leeloo seated beside the table in a sunbeam of pure innocence, chewing with the slow rhythm of a creature savoring destiny. On the table the castle section gaped. One piece was gone, and on the rug below lay half of it, nibbled to a crescent, damp at the edges, unmistakably tasted. I stared. She swallowed, washed her face with both paws like a diner finishing a fine meal, and looked at me with eyes full of peace. No remorse was found at the scene, then or ever.
Now the tale must pause for the keeper’s serious footnote, because legends should never replace good care. A rabbit chewing cardboard and paper is ordinary mischief, but anything actually swallowed, any change in appetite, droppings, energy, or behavior afterward, goes straight to my rabbit vet without delay, and I watch closely for a full day after any such feast. I am a storyteller on this page, not a clinician, and the clinic makes every health call in this house. On that night Leeloo stayed bright, bouncy, and enormously pleased with herself, munching hay with normal enthusiasm and producing her usual output on schedule, and I exhaled. The mountain had lost a tooth. The rabbit, thankfully, had lost nothing.
The trial of crumbs and the defense speech
What followed was the trial of the century, held on the rug with one judge, one suspect, and half a piece of evidence. The prosecution, meaning me, presented the nibbled crescent and rested its case in under a minute. The defense, meaning also me but in a sillier voice, argued that the piece had practically volunteered, dangling as it did over the table edge where any reasonable rabbit would conclude it had been offered. Furthermore the defense claimed the puzzle was now easier, with more places for the remaining piece to fit, a legal theory the judge found creative and entirely unpersuasive. Character witnesses were called, including the author of my notes on why books are the only thing he eats, whose testimony established that paper has tempted better rabbits than this one. The verdict was unanimous. Guilty, with extreme cuteness as the sole mitigating factor.
The new law of closed doors
Every legend ends with a law, and ours is carved above the puzzle table in spirit if not in wood. The other nine hundred ninety-nine pieces now live behind closed doors, sorted in trays on a high shelf, and the table itself is covered with a cloth weighted at the corners whenever work pauses, because human error left the piece droppable and bunny error merely finished the job. I completed the castle with a gap in its misty hills like a window onto nothing, photographed it proudly, and framed the half-eaten crescent beside the finished picture, where visitors admire it as modern art. Leeloo was released into my custody, as repeat offenders in this flat always are, and sentenced to a lifetime of forehead kisses, which she endures with noble suffering.
And so the legend closes with its moral, which the flat recites on demand. A puzzle with one piece missing is still a thousand evenings of patience minus ninety seconds of supervision, and a rabbit with crumbs on her whiskers is still the best company a keeper in Meknes could ask for. The mountain stands framed on the wall, gap and all, and beneath it naps the small grey outlaw who improved it. Suspect released, table under new management, keeper delighted. If you visit, mind the doors, guard your cardboard, and expect to hear this story told exactly this way, because some crimes deserve to become folklore, and this one, with its half-eaten evidence and its remorseless criminal, was always destined for the diary.
Next in this chapter…
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