The Rabbit Died

I had a very sweet male rabbit. Tuesday morning, after listening to a call from my husband that only contained bad news regarding taxes and the health of his aging father, I padded downstairs in my slippers and opened the shutters hoping and expecting to catch a glimpse of my chubby rabbit munching dew-kissed dandelions in the glorious light of the morning.

I thought I saw him out in the parc, a large white blob on the dark green lawn. However, I thought he looked larger than usual. As my aging eyes focused better on the scene, I saw that the large white cat, who has black spots, as the rabbit did, was sitting very close to the rabbit.

I hate this tomcat and he hates me. He runs away whenever I appear, but first he sits and transmits his hatred through an evil stare. I call him THE RAPIST because he’s always putting his penis in something: his mother, his sisters, his aunts, his tiny cousins. I was sitting out by Blanche one day, and he wasn’t more than twenty feet away from me, raping his screaming sister. One afternoon, I heard some screaming on the terrace, and when I looked out the window, he was raping a small kitten.

The Rapist being near the rabbit was not a good omen. Either he was raping the rabbit, or, as it turned out to be the case, he was pulling the rabbit’s heart out of its neck! Perhaps he did rape the rabbit. I’ll never know. Dead rabbits tell no tales.

The Rapist sat there, staring at me, and then as I approached, he ran off towards the creek. I had a dream two nights before that The Rapist had attacked the rabbit and eaten off one of its ears and part of its face, but the rabbit was still alive, and I took it inside the house, and there I lived happily ever after with my Phantom of the Opera Rabbit.

However, prescient as that dream was, the rabbit was not able to be taken in to convalesce with me because his head was missing. His head was no where to be seen. I thought this was odd, because I didn’t think that a cat would eat the head of a rabbit, along with its skull and long ears before it devoured its internal organs. I walked around the parc and looked in the weeds along the creek bank but couldn’t find a head.

I went back to the house, grabbed my gardening gloves, two trash bags and the wheelbarrow. I picked up the headless rabbit, which was still warm. I thought of cutting off one of his feet to make into a key chain, but figuring that they hadn’t provided him with any good luck, I quickly abandoned the idea. I threw him in the garbage bags and tied them up tightly. Unfortunately, my garbage bags are clear, and so the bloody mess was visible. I put it in the back of the van and drove to the trash bin. I felt this strange sensation of guilt as if I was a murderer trying to dispose of my victim. I looked around furtively for any possible witnesses, as I don’t know if you’re allowed to throw any type of dead body in the communal trash bins, and gently lowered the headless corpse into the bin.

When I returned to the house, I continued searching for the head, but only found a small swatch of his pelt.

I will miss the little guy. Now I have no excuse not to weed the dandelions out of my flower beds. Now I have no little furry white blob to greet me when I open the kitchen shutters in the morning. I’ll miss Monsieur Bush. (That was the name the neighbor gave him when she took care of him for me during the winter of 2002-03.)