I’m a Backyard Bunny and I’ve More Than Earned This Thousand-Yard Stare
And you have no idea what I’ve been through.
I came into this lousy world as one of ten screeching balls of fur. My mother, rest her lecherous old bones, didn’t stick around long. She hopped away the second we could put our paws on a dewy clover leaf. That’s the way it is around here: no lingering, no warmth, nobody to look after those floppy ears of yours. Do you know what it’s like to see three of your baby brothers carried off by a ravenous red-tail hawk? The fear in their bright, innocent eyes? One never forgets it.
See this scar on my nose? It could’ve been me…it almost was.
This non-HOA neighborhood is one death trap after another. Coyotes lick their chops at the thought of getting a hold of my fluffy ass. The patch of ragweed on the corner of Elm Street is an oasis, a refuge from the horrors that lurk beyond the next white picket fence. Darkness is a sweet escape. Still, it isn’t long before a smoky Maine Coon shows up, her hulking shoulders cutting through the night. That’s one bloodthirsty broad. An owl betrays my position, the faithless bastard. I bounce, heart pounding in my round little chest. I’m safe under the ivy, for now. I pass the night in a liminal state: not quite asleep, not quite awake.
Hell, am I even alive?
Hunger scrapes at my stomach like a crow gnaws on a discarded KFC hot wing. Crabgrass will suffice in a pinch, but what I wouldn’t give for something heartier. Humans in clunky Crocs and brightly-colored gloves cast seeds recklessly about. Half of that won’t grow; damn Tiktok for putting ‘chaos gardening’ in their empty, straw hat-covered heads. But the possibility of vegetables: sweet, crunchy vegetables…if I survive to harvest time.
The chittering of songbirds belies a cold, grim existence. Don’t let those feathery fools deceive you.
I spot a female cottontail. She sees me. We face our precious, twitching noses at one another. I charge. She leaps into the air, away from my touch. I repeat. She is aggressive, even boxing me several times in the mouth. Sure, to onlookers it’s just a funny bunny dance, two wascally wabbits flitting and fluttering in the sunshine. Twitterpated, they might say. But what happens in those shrubs, away from prying eyes, is far bleaker. Our mating is soulless, without tenderness. An escape from the continual horrors of our lives in this neighborhood. We part, knowing if we ever meet again, it will be a brief glance across the crabgrass-covered yard. A flicker of remembrance that once we shared a moment in the brush. Those tiny little furballs of hers that show up a month later…are they mine? Ugh. What am I saying?
They’re barely hers.
The worst part is, nobody cares. They have this image of us in their minds. The Easter Bunny. Bugs Bunny. Peter Rabbit. All bullshit. Does the Easter Bunny even make it to Easter? Or does that pastel poser’s carcass dry up before the equinox? And out in the wild, Bugs would be too busy nursing flashbacks to sing opera or befriend a spluttering duck. It takes brass balls to hop through a gardener’s patch in broad daylight and make it out alive. Peter Rabbit ain’t got shit on me.
They say “war is hell.” But wars end, unlike the unrelenting stretch of time wrapping its claws around this 21st-century neighborhood in suburban North America, where the smallest and cutest are fodder for the biggest and coolest and most likely to grace a nation’s currency. That’s hell. That’s hell in a hey-that’s-mine-get-your-damn-
Time to run. Old Lady Jameson just let out her golden retriever and that shaggy son of a bitch is just itching to get a piece of me.
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Celina is a history degree recipient, PNW resident, and loving fan of a delightful Aussie (the human kind). Her work has been published in Slackjaw, The Belladonna, and Weekly Humorist. Find her at celinawrites.com
