An Irreversible Change

The skies were almost a sickly yellow as the young rabbit sprinted through the forest alone. Being alone was all he had ever known really, being forced to run with the gunshots of hunters, the constant floods that seemed to come from nowhere, and the heat of the sky chasing him off from anyone that he would possibly get to know.

           Water is few and far between his long treks north despite the constant flooding – good water anyway – as he tried to escape the heat that always permeated the air and made his fur feel as heavy as if water was soaking it.

He hadn’t known a life beyond this, beyond a world so far gone that it couldn’t be brought back. The carbon dioxide emissions had become too great for the earth’s atmosphere, all of the forests seemed to be on fire all of the time now, and the north and south poles had been melted down to a few drippy glaciers. Humans were desperate for food and survival, the heat, fire, and floods dismantling their governments and economies and leaving them to their devices.

So, it seemed that ever since the young rabbit was born, he was running. He was thin because good plants to eat were hard to find, and his body was constantly burning any fat he had to keep him running. It was a horrible life, and the rabbit could not recall a single moment of joy in it either.

The rabbit found an abandoned burrow to sleep in for a while, a safe place for a few hours. He knew he couldn’t stay. He knew because every time he ended up feeling safe, the gunshots were ringing through the air again, the fire seemed to be directly on his back it felt, the water was gushing and rising at his feet again.

So, he slept for now and tried to not get too comfortable. In a few hours, though, his nose twitched him awake with the invading scent of smoke. A fire was near, but not near enough to make him run just yet.

He raised his exhausted and strained body shakily, and then he was off ambling for some sort of food. Most of the small shrubs and growths he came across were dried out and lacking any sort of nutrition, though he did find some plants that were green enough for his liking.

As he sniffed along the ground in search of some more food before he had to run again, a pleasant smell attacked his nose. It smelled sweet and spicy and different from the smoke he had ever smelled before.

Cautiously, the rabbit crawled toward the smell and found something he had never seen before. It was a small, white, flattened object that had orange coloring at the end. The spicy and sweet smoky smell caused him to sniff the paper-like thing a bit more before he finally decided to eat it, desperate enough for any food at this point.

It tasted as good as it smelled, and he found a litter of the strange objects that he quickly ate up. It didn’t cross the rabbits mind of where these things came from or what they were since they weren’t plants; he only thought of his hunger and his frantic need for survival.

As soon as he had eaten a good amount, the smell of smoke paired with a new heat the rabbit was familiar with arrived again, and it was time to run. The rabbit put his worn-out muscles to work again as he fled from the heat, feeling it sink through his fur and his skin down to his bones. His mouth was dried, it was unbearably hot, and he was dehydrated and in desperate need for some good water.

Suddenly, his stomach started cramping as he ran, a new pain that he was not familiar with. It caused him to shorten his strides and twitch as he scurried away from the fire, needing some kind of relief from the unbearable pain in his stomach.

As if God heard his prayers, water glinted in the corner of his eye and caused him to halt. Water was what he wanted, what he needed, and he wasted no time in sprinting towards it and gulping it down greedily.

He spent a while drinking and filling his body up with water, though his stomach ached horribly as he stood there. Once he was done, he looked up from the puddle of water and saw a strange black substance covering it on the end, and he realized that the taste in his mouth was odd.

His throat felt coated in something unfamiliar to him, and suddenly it was hard to breathe. The rabbit fell on his side from the nauseating pain in his stomach and his struggle to breathe, and laying there, he realized that he didn’t want to get up anymore.

His whole life had consisted of running and fear for reasons that he did not understand, under conditions that were not his fault in the slightest. His bones and muscles ached, his stomach felt like it was tearing, and he could hardly breathe anymore from the smoky air to the strange substance coating his throat.

He couldn’t think of a single time he ever felt joy in his life, only pain, fear, and suffering. And laying on the forest floor in a world that always seemed to be constantly burning and flooding, he couldn’t find a reason to get up and run anymore.

Soon, his throat closed from the oil he had accidentally drunk and his stomach was full of the cigarettes his body couldn’t ingest, and he died there, all alone on the forest floor. Later, the forest fire that always seemed at his back swallowed him up, and much later flooding waters came and cleansed his charred body from before.

He was dead, the world was still in constant havoc, and it remain irreversible as it continued to take more innocent lives.