Rabbits in the Water

CONTENT WARNINGS: Mental Health, War Themes, Violence, Death, Physical Injury, Grief & Loss

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I regret standing there for so long watching the river. There were rabbits in the water. Yes: rabbits. I could not tear my gaze from them, and so my mind saw what my eyes would not.

There was a sky; a vast sky of pallid grey, blue, and black, and a shattered luminance to bare its lividity. Bright halos clung to celestial bodies when from behind rippling clouds they revealed broken faces. I looked to the stars and they blinked—I swore they blinked—before, one by one, they shot in wide, blinding arcs across the night and hung mid-air in hesitant lingers until they burnt themselves out. Sparks fell to the ground beneath them near my position.

Ankle-deep in water, my next footfall ploughed through mud. Somewhere out in the distance, an old song clung to smoke wafting through stale air. I could not hear the lyrics. They died with the sun, and the light, and the crack-clang-pop—

The river kissed my hand. I pulled back as if bitten, too aware now of my torn nails and grime beneath them, leaking wounds scabbed over on the back of my hand, yellow crystals festering on the edges of jagged lacerations. I don’t remember how any of it got there. I don’t remember the last time I felt clean.

The stars flared and wiped away a patch of night. I raised my chin to the darkened sky and uttered a word; a cry for the sun, but I could not be sure. My own heartbeat had been silenced by the savage boom of a metal beast diving earthward with the force of a thousand-tonne weight. The whizz that hailed it came after, dragging along the distant thunderclap that had sent it deep into the ground—both much too late for anyone to take cover. When the beast bored its way through the rock, the earth rattled. It was gone for now, but not forever. Like an ouroboros it ever hungered, and when at last it disappeared beneath the soil its head rose anew in the sky to chase its feast.

Water sloshed against my collarbone as the stars flared again. Beneath my boot, the riverbed gasped and gave way. I could not take another step.

When the world first began to burn, I was young enough to fool myself into believing I was already old. Now that the golden years I was promised were tarnished beneath endless layers of soot and ash, I longed to take it back.

Stars whizzed overhead with eerie mechanical perfection. When the first streak of searing light shattered the water, I let myself slip below.

Cold and wet pierced my nose. Liquid bloomed within my lungs. I had to stand or it would devour me. I had to, but when I surfaced, gasping for air, I heard it again: the crack-clang-pop-snap-bang— 

I shut my eyes, but the stars were so bright their light bled through my eyelids. They hardly looked like stars anymore and I knew they were not, but sheer desperation raked and railed against my ribs. I wanted to believe it. Looking at the sky could not wrack me with memories of the sun if I believed. Moving under cover of night could not unravel me. Taking one more step across this river would not tempt the teeth of a saw grinding against my rapidly-fraying tether.

Another magnificent, deafening burst. The beast was back, and as its head plunged into the riverbed a fountain of water soaked me. The beast had not seen fit to take me with it; not me. Not this time.

I mustered the will within to find my balance atop rocks and shells and sediment in an unforgiving current. That was when I stopped. That was when the water rippled, and I saw what burdens it carried, and I wished the river would hold me, too.

I laid down and begged the sun for solace. An endless stream of sulfurous oil flowed freely in my mind. From deep within, a portrait of my youth surfaced.

A woman’s greatest weapon is her smile, my mother used to say.

Her words gave way to the times my older brothers let me along when they went up the hill near our farm to hunt rabbits for supper.

A woman’s greatest weapon is her instinct, they said.

The first time I shot my own rabbit, it took me the whole walk back and then some to come to grips with what I’d done and steel myself against it. I presented the rabbit to my father with a smile.

A woman’s greatest weapon is pride in her work, he said, and it felt hollow when a tear slid down my cheek.

From the rabbit’s foot, my grandmother fashioned a charm to hang upon my chatelaine between the scissors, thimble, and spool of string.

A woman’s greatest weapon is knowing every tool at her disposal, she said.

Not long after the world began to burn, a cat knocked over a candle and set our barn alight. That was what the paper boy cried on the street corner, though both he and the newsmen who wrote about it knew full-well no cat or candle had been present. Grandmother told me they couldn’t let anyone think there was reason to panic. Mother assured me it was no more than some common hooligans taking their fathers’ front-porch banter to heart.

But next time a candle fell at our neighbour’s house. A couple empty shops. A church. Soon after, a great many candles fell inside our town hall.

Some days later, my brothers went to hunt rabbits again and forbade me from joining them on the other side of the hill. Someone had to look after mother and father, after all, and let them know when another candle fell. I couldn't stand to be left behind, but grandmother only laughed at my indignation and called me lucky. At her behest, I kept the rabbit's foot at my side, though I envied my brothers the chance to prove their worth.

In the mornings, I was made to stand in front of the burnt-out shell of the old town hall while the mayor held a daily lottery. I never won. Plenty of my neighbours did: cousins, school friends, townspeople I had come to see as fixtures within the local saloon. I saw the looks in my elders’ eyes any time I went to town and the mayor did not say my name. I knew they thought me a coward. Worse, I agreed with them. It wasn't right that I was made to stay behind, and so I stowed the rabbit's foot in my pocket and let righteous indignation draw me up the hill with no winning ticket in hand.

I never did shake the feeling my grandmother knew something I did not. Perhaps the rabbit’s foot would have kept me lucky if my own conscience did not interfere. Still, I went up the hill.

When I stumbled down the other side, a burden heavier than I’d carried before awaited me and my comrades.

A woman’s greatest weapon is her unwavering allegiance, said the man inside a tent at the bottom of the hill as he sent me on the hunt.

The next time I shot a rabbit, my boot crushed yellow petals into the mud, leaving them wilted and bruised in soggy footprints. My prey and I played cat-and-mouse for hours in a vast field of half-trampled flowers, and when I caught him on the end of my bayonet I tried to smile.

How fitting to have claimed you in the garden of the sun, I said, half-repeating words I read in a morale pamphlet one day. It did not make me proud, though I wanted it to. I carried on to the rallying cry I’d seen plastered on a poster just the day before: A woman’s greatest weapon is the one I hold in my hands.

Yet still a tear slid down my cheek, and another for the next rabbit, and the next, and the next. By now, hunting had become second nature, but something about the way they moved and the disquieting mirror in the depths of their pupils and the unending crack-clang-pop-snap-bang-bang-crack-pop-pop-pop...

When my eyes finally opened, it was dawn. Washed ashore on the riverbank, I had moved no closer to the other side than when I first tried to cross. Beside me rested another rabbit, black and blue and pallid. A whole warren’s worth floated in the water, and more rested on the shoreline. The graves commission would be by soon enough to see them collected, wrapped in butcher’s paper, boxed up, sent home.

I wiped my nose on my sleeve. Rivulets of red slickened my skin. I pulled the rabbit’s foot out of my knapsack and rubbed it between my thumb and forefinger. The overwhelming urge to cast it into the water seized me.

Just how many rabbits would sate the world’s hunger? How many more times would we let it burn?

I raised my arm above my head, caught between a throw and an offering to the sun. Beneath searing daylight, the veil parted and I was made to see the truth. These rabbits wore no coats of fur, but cloth, and helms of metal on their heads. Some bore guns just like mine; others, flags, and though the fabrics and patterns splattered with glistening blood clashed so terribly, beneath the sun they looked the same to me.

An unbearable thought weighed down my arm. When night returned, so would the struggle, and the cracks, and the pops, and the bangs.