Dust

I shot my third rabbit today.

I think there’s a litter nearby, because they all look the same. White with grey spots, and they all had one solid brown ear. It was something out of a grubby Alice in Wonderland, or a Playboy bunny at the end of her shift. I saw both of those in a shop in New York, once, back when we had money to travel.

My baby sister likes to think that the critters all have feelings, and that they’re living some happy lives with tea and cookies in a bow-tied little hole in the base of a tree trunk, and that they’re nibbling at our vegetable patch to bring bits back for some fluffy baby bunnies. She’s ten, and therefore wrong. See, I’ve dealt with rabbits before. Those bastards are always hopping around, just out of reach as they snatch up my greens. There’s something impish and smug about them too, like a hooting and hollering road rascal on a mission to tip cattle. They pop up each spring in droves. Usually a trap and a couple bullets will run them off, but they’re particularly persistent this year.

When I shot the third one I missed, and only hit its ear. The white ear. It scrambled away and I lunged after it, kicking up dust around my boots. It took a minute but I finally managed to grab it as I dove forward, forearms getting all scraped up in the dusty road just outside the barn fence. The creature squirmed and squeaked, and its ugly red eyes flashed with something much too violent for a grass eater.

It glared at me, so I snapped its neck.

This one I skin.

–

My baby sister got sad when she poked at her stew and found it tender and sweet, as only rabbit meat can be. She got even sadder when I gave her the new stuffie I stitched for her, with its soft rabbit’s fur. She stormed to her room, leaving her stew cooling on the oak table with dust in the cracks, and I sighed as she slammed the door. I don’t know why I try with her.

Later though, I warmed her bowl and brought it for her, not wanting to waste the good meat or have her go to bed hungry. I found her in a puddle at the end of her bed, clutching her new rabbit stuffie.

“I thought you didn’t like it,” I say, handing her the bowl. After a sullen moment, she took it. I knew she was hungry.

“I have to let it die for something.”

“It died so we could eat.”

“What if it had a family?” Sweet Jesus, there was a tear in her eye.

“I’m sure its brothers and sisters will come to terrorize us in its honor, don’t you worry about that, Bessie.”

“Stop calling me that.”

“But you have such beautiful round cow eyes.” I poke her in the belly. She smiles reluctantly, and I have to reach out to stabilize her bowl before it tips.

My sister yawns as she picks at her stew, and I nudge her to finish the bowl. She does, after a minute.

“Go to bed,” I say to her. Usually she complains, but not tonight. She strokes the head of her rabbit as I pull the blanket up to her chin.

I blew out the candle and left her be, the door creaking as I shut it. My arm brushes against the frame and I remember how they’re rubbed raw from my wrestling earlier.

We have one mirror in the house. It sits above the washbasin and is grimy from the steam baths that my sister insists on taking. Through the rust, my arms look purple in the firelight. I spit on them to rub the gravel away, and take water from the barrel in my cupped hands. The rocks come away red.

I don’t like feeling dirty, even though I usually am. There’s dust everywhere–in the cracks in the mirror, swirling at the bottom of the water basin, and very likely in my blood, for years now. My lungs, certainly. My hair. Under my breasts. Behind my eyeballs.

The neighbors all say that the dust will pass. It’s come before and it left before, never this much but that’s to be expected. We just gotta look after our own, make sure we have enough to eat, and enough good dirt to grow from.

I pick a single rabbit hair out of the scrape in my wrist. It snags.

Little Bessie and I go into town the next day on our real bessie, Hera the cow. My sister named her. I wouldn’t have bothered, but she’s a good girl, and just about part of the family by now. It’ll be a shame when we have to put her down.

As we ride in, we see the new pop-up shop selling color televisions. My sister wants one, and I tell her fat chance every time she brings it up. Like we have money for that junk. It’s just a fleeting fad anyway.

It’s not the Dust Bowl anymore, but where we live, the Dust Bowl never really ended. Our farms are stable but stale. Our dirt storms just stopped getting headlines, which some folks are mad about, but I think it’s idiotic to pander to all those businessmen and politicians. All they do is pity, and there’s no room for thoughts and prayers where there’s real work to be done. It’s no wonder they call us “Real America”—we’re the only thing left in this godforsaken country that’s not made out of plastic and silicone.

We leave Hera the cow to drink at the trough and push open the shop door with a jingle. I’m buying sugar and oil, and Little Bessie runs off to look at the televisions. It’s a tight day for bills, but I leave the shop with a pound over my shoulder and a leaking can in my bag. I’ll scrub it later.

Little Bessie is stroking Hera with a frown on her face.

“What happened?”

“Arlo was asking why we were riding Hera instead of Misty.”

Arlo, that hillbilly trash. I toss my bag up onto Hera’s back. “You shouldn’t talk to him.”

“He’s nice sometimes.”

“Someone who’s nice sometimes is mean at other times.”

“He was just asking.”

“No, he wasn’t. He knew we had to sell Misty. He was being seedy.” I swing my legs over Hera’s makeshift saddle, and reach down for my sister.

“I still don’t get why we couldn’t get another horse,” she asks as I hoist her up onto the cow.

“Do you have money for a horse?”

She picked at the ends of her braids. “No.”

“Well there you go then.”

Little Bessie sighed. “Can we at least get a color television?”

“We can’t even get a regular television,” I groan. “All those machines are hippie nonsense. Let the flower childs have them.”

“We could watch the auctions from the couch though! And actually see each of the bulls' colors, not just smudges of them from the back of the crowd.”

“You know what, Bes,” I say, kicking my heels to get Hera going, “When I finally get the farm back in order and you get rich and famous from your singing, we’ll get a color television.”

I don’t look back, but I know my baby sister is smiling, as if that’ll actually happen some day.

There’s another damn rabbit at the fence. Waiting for me.

I tell Little Bessie to take Hera into the barn and get her some hay, and I grab the gun. As soon as she sees it, Bes starts pleading.

“It’s not hurting nobody–”

“It’s hurting us every minute it’s alive to eat our crops.” I cock the rifle.

“But maybe it’s not eating our crops and–and it needs to eat too–”

“Then it’ll eat someone else’s crops.”

I leave her in the barn as I march to the fence.

It’s just sitting there. Identical to the others, not a fear in the world as I point a rifle at it. Its one brown ear turns towards me, while the other calmly remains pointed to a cicada on a leaf a few feet away. It’s a beautiful tune, and I march in time with it.

The rabbit looks at me. I focus in on it, looking down the barrel at its beady little eyes. It finally has the decency to point both its ears at me.

The white ear has a hole through it.

It’s too late to hesitate. With blood on my boots, I pick up the limp creature, and stick a single finger through that hole. That bullet hole.

This one I bury.

–

The rabbit was in my dream that night. I shot it there, too.

–

The Lord is testing me, because when I wake up the first thing I see is the stuffed rabbit.

Bessie has crawled into my bed sometime in the night. She’s been having night terrors recently. I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do about it, but she comes to me anyway.

It’s the time of day when the sun is orange but cold, shining in chilly beams through my small window. Gilded hour, I like to call it; the opposite of golden hour. Golden hour is all warmth and the braying of horses as the sun sets. Gilded hour is just roosters bitching.

I leave Bessie to sleep with her bunny, getting up to feed the chickens. As I scatter their feed around the coop, the heels of my boots folded from putting them on too hurriedly, I see the little devil hopping across the corner of my eye.

The hole in its ear is still there, and now it’s dusted in a fine coat of dust and dirt. There’s no mistaking it this time. My fertilizer lives.

I don’t have the rifle on me, so I grab a hand shovel. It watches me as I approach.

I catch it, dig the point of the trowel into its fuzzy little chest, and it doesn’t even fight me. It just blinks, with those red eyes.

I stab it, hard. And then I stab it again. And again, until it’s mushy and sloppy in death.

This one I toss over the fence without ceremony.

–

It’s several weeks before it comes back, this time. Enough time for Bessie and I to have to restock the sugar, and for the new chickens to be born under a spring storm. Things are beautiful this time of year.

I see it appear under the cover of night, as I stand at the kitchen window washing pans. Weaseling its way under the fence, ears folded back, the hole in the white one almost getting snagged on a loose wire. This time, there’s the slightest crater in its chest. Despite that, it breathes fine, and hops happily towards the crops.

I watch it go. It starts to nibble.

I feel like I’m in a daze as I exit the house. As I walk towards it once more, deja vu crawling up between my shoulder blades. I grab it by the back of the neck.

Its nose wiggles as it looks at me. The devil licks its lips, and there’s cabbage between its front teeth.

This one I bring into my home.

–

Little Bessie squeals at the idea of having a pet, so I tell her it’s her responsibility. The first thing she does is give it a bath, and I watch how carefully she cleans its ear, even though it seems as though the wound is years old. She feeds it every day from her own plate, and leaves little bowls of water around the house that I’m constantly trodding on.

It is cute, occasionally. Despite its devil eyes.

Some nights I like to sit on the porch. I dust off a patch on the steps and sit myself down, watching the yellowing crops swaying in the breeze, the stars bright in a purple sky. The rabbit comes and sits with me as Bessie finishes her chores.

It seems almost human as it sits, silently, contemplating the sky alongside me. Human in a curious way, but also a greedy, hungry one. Nothing like the sweet little bunny that Bessie sees, and nothing like the ignorant nuisance that I used to see it as. I don’t know what it is, and I don’t like this creature, but if I can’t destroy it, I have to learn to live with it.

I almost believe it’s thinking the same thing about me.

–

The house is empty now.

No more farms. No more chickens and crops and Hera. In fact, the house itself will be gone soon as well– sold to the land developers.

Nobody has lived in this house for a long time–not really. It belonged to a family for many years, and then two sisters that couldn’t really be called a family anymore. It seemed like the ghosts were the true tenants.

Mr. Morgan sighs as he shuts the sale file. It’s nice to read the history of such places, especially ones with such heartbreakingly tragic stories. It grounds him, makes him content to go home to his wife each night.

He enters the house, beginning his inspection. It’s an odd surprise to see it full of objects: chairs and shelves, pots and a big oak desk. He trips over a small bowl of water just inside the threshold. Everything is covered in a layer of powder, and it looks sadly abandoned, a heartbeat thrumming weakly beneath the dust. He wonders where the sisters went.

He opens the master bedroom door–if you can call it that–and is poked in the eyes by a sharp ray of cold sunlight. He’s blinded for a moment, rubbing sight back into his eyes, but when he finally regains his vision, there’s a small disturbance in the scenery. A small creature sits on the bed, curled up in an indentation in the sheets, as though someone was just laying there. It looks sickly at first, but when Mr. Morgan catches the critter’s red eye, it raises its head, stretching its front legs. When its ears perk up, there’s a hole in one.

The rabbit hops down from the bed, leaving almost no disturbance in the dust as it does so. It comes to sit at Mr. Morgan’s feet.

It’s a cute little thing, really.

Mr. Morgan reaches into his bag and brings out the salad that his wife packed him for lunch. He places it in front of the creature.

The rabbit bows its head and eats.