LETTING BUNNIES GO

[So, finally, here's some new work! I read this at "RE:Action", my rockin' new reading series I co-curate with Margot Bordelon. This piece was recently published by No Touching Magazine in their "home" issue. Also, keep up-to-date on my other killer readings HERE.]


My dad is pissed. Animals are eating his whole garden and we haven’t seen one in there yet. My dad looks like Alan Alda with an Abe Lincoln beard and when he gets mad, he gets quiet.

I don’t like that quiet, so I stay away as long as I can.

See Dad worked real hard on that garden. He’d surrounded a whole section of our backyard with old railroad ties and started planting like crazy. So when my dad realizes it’s rabbits eating his carrots and cabbage, he calls me over and we go through the rows looking for holes. He’s going to poison them, he says. Then he sees my eight year-olds eyes and says maybe he might be able to find a live-trap at the hardware store. Maybe, he says; He’s still real pissed. We both stoop over swiping gnawed radish leaves up to look under neither until my father stops.

“Hm,” he says, looking down, not telling me nothin’.

I step over the surviving vegetables carefully.

“Shhh…,” Dad says, raising his arm like a wing and pulling me into his body. He’s not mad anymore. I mean he’s forgotten his mad for a while, because there at his feet is a nest of bunnies. Six little bodies the size and color of potatoes, unmoving, ears back, eyes closed. I don’t even know if they’re opened their eyes yet they’re so small.

My dad’s a biologist, so he gives me a lesson on rabbits right there. I can’t tell you a word he says. Usually, I just look him in the eyes, scrunch my eyebrows together and nod, making it look like I get it. I’m just thinking to myself:

PETS! I’m going to have bunnies to play with and feed carrots and show all my friends and name them! I get to name them!

“So go ask you mother for a shoebox, Jeffrey, and we’ll take them to the wildlife preserve.”

“What?” What is he talking about? I should have been listening. “We’re not keeping them, Dad?”

“Weren’t you listening to what I just said?”

He says that to me a lot. But I run off and get the shoebox. I’m a good boy. I do what my father tells me to. And when I get back to garden, my father has pulled the nest apart to get at the little rabbits and he’s busy filling a hole he’s found with rocks. He explains that’s where the parents were getting in. So, the plan was to take the babies out to a field where they could survive on their own. They didn’t need to live in the city where they could be eaten by the Lekin’s poodle or any one of the Cooper’s cats. I got that, but I wanted pets. My dad was allergic to fur and feathers, so all I got was goldfish and crawdads. “I’d keep them outside,” I told him. “I’d make sure they didn’t eat the garden and I’d pet them and comb them and water them and they’d be really really happy.”

“Jeffrey, no you know that rabbits aren’t pets.”

“But Mrs. Bonsib at school, she has angora rabbits and she combs them and makes scarves from their fur and she gets to keep them as pets and they’re happy I know ‘cause she tells me about them all the time and she could teach me how to take care of these ones.”

“Your teacher lives on a farm, Jeffrey. And, besides, don’t you think they deserve to be free?”

No. No, I do not, I think. But I don’t say it. I’m the good boy. I nod my head and watch as my father carefully pulls the sleep things apart and carefully passes them from his palm into the bottom of the box where they quickly fall back asleep. Dad lets me put a couple in the box, guides my hands, explains how fragile their little bones are still. Then we get to the last baby. He’s sitting under the rest. His legs are stretched out and to the sides. When I scoop him up carefully, he doesn’t wake like the other ones.

“Is it still alive?” my father asks me. I don’t know. I hope so. “He doesn’t look so good, Jeff.” Dad calls me Jeff instead of Jeffrey and I get nervous. The body’s warm, but I’m afraid I’m holding death. So I poke him a little and he wriggles. His lungs take a deep breath and he settles in again. I hold him up for my dad to examine him. After a few minutes of looking, my father gives me the prognosis:

“I think his hind legs are broken. He was probably born that way. He won’t survive in the wild.”

“I’ll take care of him.” I say, trying not to be too excited about the rabbit’s misfortune. “I’ll ask Mrs. Bonsib how to take care of him and stuff.”

And to my surprise, my father lets me keep him. He lets me set up a heat lamp in the garage over a nest of newspaper and I try to carefully feed him water from an eyedropper. I cut up carrots with my mother only to find out he’s too young to eat solid food still. And Mrs Bonsib even lets me go home during lunch to feed him. He drags his little body a bit and opens his mouth for water, but that’s all he does and everybody knows he’ll die soon. Except me. What I know is that us two will be in the backyard playing soon. I’ll make him a little wheelchair and he’ll be chow down on carrots soon. I am positive. Until he dies. Friday, I come home for lunch and he’s hard as a rock and I never ever want to have a pet again.

But what I remember from then on is not those last dark days, but rather the trip out to the wildlife preserve with my dad, the shoebox of babies on my lap. I remember them waking and looking around. I remember my father finding a dirt path down to an open field that’s golden and seemingly endless with a blue sky to match. We get out of our enormous station wagon and walk down a ways, away from the road, away from where anyone will bother them. And then my father reassures me that their lives will be better out here and that I need to let them go. I don’t want to. I don’t tell him that and I don’t cry. Instead I set the box down and tip it so that they slide slowly out. I expect them to realize they’ve been set free, but they just stay there as though they are still in the box, their little noses wriggling. Their lives changed and unchanged, just like mine.