My sister, Allie, and I stumbled upon the rabbits at a rural market outside of Tulsa, Oklahoma. There were other things being sold at the market of course—nuts, fruits, vegetables—but it was the one vendor with rabbits that caught our attention. The vendor stood behind his fold-out table like all the rest, making friendly eye contact with passersby. Unlike those other part-time merchants, however, this man’s table wasn’t covered in ripe tomatoes and buckets of pecans, but instead displayed a couple of rusty-wire cages that held rabbits taking their rapid breaths on straw bedding.
Allie and I decided almost immediately that we could not live without a pair of rabbits all our own and went to work trying to convince our dad to let us take them home. We explained how very well behaved we would be forever onward, and how we would do all our chores without him ever needing to ask.
“Just let us have them!”
My father wore his normal weekend wear of a beer-themed t-shirt tucked into cargo khaki shorts and ratty white tennis shoes with white socks pulled halfway up his calves (socks he’d worn so long that the hair on his legs had worn away beneath the fabric). He looked down at us, myself a sandy-blonde tomboy and my sister, a tow-headed, kid-genius begging for the joy only rabbits could bring us. After much whimpering and pleading, my dad acquiesced and told us we could have the rabbits, but there was one condition: we must clean their pen and feed them, or else he would kill them and feed them to us. It was a fair, clear-cut agreement, and my sister and I took it without negotiation.
We picked two rabbits; mine was male, my sister’s female. The male was white with two large black spots. Allie’s was a sort of brownish-beige. I came to the conclusion almost immediately that mine had superior and far more sophisticated coloring.
We got a cardboard box to put them in, and I remember distinctly that the second we started to place my rabbit in the box with hers, he began humping vigorously at the air trying desperately to inseminate my sister’s pet. The meaning of the phrase breeding like rabbits became clear to me in that moment. I marveled at the perfection of idioms as we got another box to separate them for the long drive home.
We set the rabbits up in a pen in the concrete-floored basement with some feed and a gate to separate them. There, we kept them for some time—weeks or days, I can’t be sure. The point of the rabbits, I realize now, was in the effort to acquire them. They lost their luster shortly after we actually possessed them. I was a capricious child and am a capricious adult, prone to short-lived hobbies and shorter-lived flings. As my grandmother always likes to remind me, “You handle women like a tennis player swinging at tennis balls. They come and they go, they come and they go.”
So it was with the rabbits.
At first I tended to them like a new mother, darting downstairs to the dark basement to be sure they hadn’t run out of water or food, caressing them and cooing over their small, warm bodies. Then I went downstairs less and less. The basement was so out of the way and so frightening, cold, and dirty besides. Soon, I was dragging my feet each time my dad reminded me of their existence.
I didn’t much like rabbits, it turned out. But now I had them. What a drag, that when you owned a living thing you had to care for it continuously. This is perhaps when I learned to love inanimate objects. How much simpler they are, never needing to be fed, never shitting or pissing. And yet, here I was responsible for the life of these innocent rabbits. It was my own fault; I’d begged for them. I cursed that rural market.
And then I remembered my dad’s deal, which at the time had seemed like such a silly thing. Why would we ever stop caring for them? I’d thought so naively at the market. Only now, I looked at the rabbits, and they did not spark any joy in me. They raised not a dash of love in my cold, changing child heart. They were only work: feeding and cleaning and feeding some more. They sentenced me to a life of endless labor, barely keeping ahead of that tart rodent smell.
One day, I left my bedroom and went to the basement to find my sister there, peering into the rabbit pen. Her shoulders stooped low over the pen as she watched them hop in the ill-lit room. She watched them as one might watch a rerun of an episode one has already seen a thousand times before: disinterestedly, with all the laughter bled out of the old jokes, all the surprises of the plot dulled by repetition.
It seemed she had similarly fallen out of love with them.
“Do you remember what Dad said?” I asked her. She nodded. It was an almost wordless exchange. We knew what we must do. We went to our dad and told him we couldn’t care for our pets anymore. It was a good run, but we’d had enough. He understood and began preparations for rabbit stew.
What was strange was the immediate relief I felt. How easy it was to take something into your life and discard it on a whim. You couldn’t do that with people. Or you could, but the results were heartbreak, guilt, and self-loathing. The rabbits, on the other hand, were delicious, and I never felt an ounce of regret over the decision to end things with them.
What made a person and a pet different? — aside, of course, from the basic fact that you can’t simply cannibalize a human when you want them out of your life. Even after all this time, I feel nothing serious for those rabbits, while old love affairs or bad partings still make my chest tighten long past when time should have lessened the pain.
Still, I dwell on the rabbits with a sense of— is it nostalgia, or just an obligatory feeling of mourning and gratitude to those rabbits who gave their lives in service to me as pets and eventually, as dinner?
My dad broke their necks while we were out running errands, and when we came home, he showed us how to skin them.
I kept the black and white pelt of my rabbit for years until one day I met a girl on the internet and we slept together for a few months. She was an artist who used road kill and trash for multimedia works, and I bestowed gifts upon her like mummified iguanas and small bones and feathers and eventually, when I left town, moving away in hopes of “bigger and better things,” I gave her that pelt. *
It’s hard to tell that story without making my dad and myself sound villainous or, at the very least, callous. So, perhaps I should end with another story about another rabbit, one we didn’t eat.
It must have been spring when it happened, since bunnies were darting around our neighborhood, not heeding the dogs that scrambled after them and the children who just as eagerly tottered behind squealing, “A bunny! A bunny!”
I love to remember the neighborhood as it looked then, green and bright with odd shaded spots in the yard from the magnolia and pecan trees. The street would be full of young mothers who ignited something in my budding queerness as they power-walked in pairs with the hips and authority of a womanhood I desired in ways I did not then understand. I wanted to be outside always, in our front yard, or else in the back where my dad was growing a bamboo forest that infuriated the neighbors whenever the stalks inevitably sprouted in their own, tamer yards.
It was during one of these springs that my brother, Aaron, had a genius idea, genius to me, because he was a year and a half older and seemed cleverer as illustrated by the idea itself: we should engineer a rabbit trap. It was a simple contraption made of sticks tipi-ed together in a bushy corner of the front yard. We would place a carrot under the sticks, because carrots, as Bugs Bunny taught us, were a rabbit’s favorite meal.
My brother explained that a rabbit would knock the sticks over in its haste to eat, and they would collapse on him—et voila, it would be ours! We were hunting wabbits. There was only one problem…we had no carrots.
My mom came out to assess our handiwork. It was a poor, pitiable thing, the trap. Any adult could see there was no hope in us catching anything with it. But instead of judging it, my mom beamed with enthusiasm at the trap her brilliant children had built, and we beamed back reflecting her pride.
“We can get carrots,” she said and shuffled us into the car. We went to the store and when we returned, my dad came out of the house with an astonishing surprise. He held a fat rabbit in his arms and explained that we hadn’t needed the carrot after all since, while we were out, our rabbit trap had worked and now we had this: a great big, white rabbit. We kept that rabbit for a short while before eventually growing bored of it too. Though I’ve asked, no one in my family can be sure what happened to it after that. Did we set it free or give it away? Its destiny was not really important. It was out of our lives, and we were once again rabbitless.
Many years went by, and my brother and I would tell friends this incredible story of our ingenious scheme. How we had so cleverly trapped a rabbit without even needing a carrot. The story was never about the rabbit itself so much as the conquest of getting it, and we held onto that victory closely until one day, years later at dinner, my mom burst out laughing.
“You remember when we tricked you into thinking you caught a rabbit?”
My brother and I protested, “But we caught that rabbit ourselves!”
And this is how we learned the true story of the rabbit trap. While my mom took us to the grocery store, my dad had gone to the pet store to buy a rabbit. It was a little joke between the two of them. They wanted to make a toast at one of our weddings and reveal this trick they’d played on us many years before. But the truth came out then.
It was worse than discovering my dad was the one who put the money under my pillow after pulling my teeth out with pliers. There was no Tooth Fairy middleman, no Santa Claus, babies did not come from storks, and most horribly, we had never in fact caught a rabbit. *
I tell these stories on dates perhaps as a way of honoring the rabbits who have passed through my life. Sometimes, I tell these stories and lean into symbolism, emphasizing the whiteness of the rabbit’s fur, thinking it a perfect metaphor for childhood purity, the falling away of innocence, and the lessons of love and responsibility. (Though the lessons are rather murky.) I mostly tell these stories to myself at night because, as I’ve said, they really aren’t about the rabbits.
I am struggling to end here, to “wrap it up,” you know?
See, in the past, I’ve always sought a moral in narratives; it is the job of a writer, I’ve long held, to teach lessons, or at least to have some compelling reason to write a story down in the first place. But I’ve realized I am the last person who should be teaching anyone anything, and I have very little reason behind doing anything I do. My capriciousness, it turns out, extends from my life and morals into my writing. As a result, I have become increasingly convinced that the only thing that makes a story worth telling is the telling itself.
