In the desert, men gather on the half-moon to watch the jackalope wives dance. Jackalope wives are horned, rabbit-like female creatures, with fur skins they remove before dancing. Men routinely want to catch a jackalope wife, but the creatures never let them get close. In the middle of the night, a young man named Anthony knocks on his grandmother’s door in a panic. He has just caught a jackalope wife by stealing her fur skin while she was dancing. Men who catch jackalope wives are supposed to burn their fur skin immediately to transform them into humans, but Anthony saved the fur from the flames when the jackalope wife began to scream. Grandma Harken tells Anthony he should have let her burn, for now she is trapped between rabbit and human in an unnatural way. She sends Anthony away. To heal the jackalope wife, Grandma Harken brings the creature to a meeting spot in the woods a few days later. There, they meet the Father of Rabbits, an aging man who seems to know Grandma Harken, calling her Maggie. Together they wait for a Patterned Person, a creature with diamond-like skin and healing powers. When the Patterned Person arrives, Grandma Harken tells the jackalope wife the Patterned Person will either kill her or heal her. She must choose to risk death or live in the in-between form. The jackalope wife surrenders to the Patterned Person, who bites her, sparking the transformation into either entirely human or entirely jackalope wife. They wait overnight with the jackalope wife to figure out which one she will turn into. Grandma Harken reveals she was once a jackalope woman, but became a human after a man stole her fur. The Father of Rabbits reveals he still has the fur he stole from Grandma Harken, and offers it to her. Instead of taking it for herself, Grandma Harken gives her fur to the struggling jackalope wife, completing her transformation back into jackalope wife form. She prances off into the dessert.