A literary mood struck me. Walking home from my friend’s house. The asphalt glistened after days of rain. I’ve made that walk hundreds of times. I could make it in my sleep. I might have once. Tonight it struck me as profound.
On the same path, a rabbit appeared in the yard beside me. Driven out by the pressures of suburban sprawl, it danced precariously close to the edge of “civilized” culture. Civilized. Hammurabi had a civilization. Eye for an eye. Everyone was blind. Tonight I saw. Tonight I saw a rabbit.
It struck me as profound, a link to prior experience. I had walked the same sidewalk months ago with my friend. We saw a rabbit on the manicured front lawn of the cookie-cutter houses that lined both sides of this ant-farm. I went to get a closer look. To say hello. Hello rabbit.
Later that night, while buying cigarettes for a minor, I saw it. The carcass of the rabbit pressed into the pavement. Its intestine five feet behind it. Its head crushed.
“Is that my rabbit?” I asked my friend.
“That’s your rabbit!” he responded.
Why my rabbit? Why my anything? My house. My toothbrush. We make these connections with objects and then they’re gone. My rabbit? Dead.
“You killed it,” he said.
“I didn’t kill it! I was with you!”
“No, when you talked to it.”
“No way!”
“If you hadn’t have stopped it, it wouldn’t have been crossing the road the exact moment a car came.”
“I couldn’t have known that!”
He shrugged. He always thinks it’s funny to get me upset. And I was.
Chaos theory. I killed the rabbit. Me. Me? If I killed the rabbit, then my parents killed the rabbit. If they did, then the society they’re in did. If society did, then all factors affecting society did. The right to vote killed the rabbit. Chaos theory. The Model T killed the rabbit. The industrial revolution killed the rabbit. Suburbia killed the rabbit.
I killed the rabbit.
Tonight was different. I shooed the rabbit away from the road. Into the darkness, away from the
streetlights. Chaos theory. Knowing that any change I make in this
complex system can have a million outcomes, I still tried to save it. What’s the point? Suburban sprawl will kill the rabbit. The paving of
Then why is it any consolation to me to think somehow I had a small role in saving its life? Knowing that no matter what I do, it won’t stop the rabbit’s death. Why do I care to save it, when all I’ll do is change the time of its demise?
Because someday suburbia will kill me. Society will kill me. And wouldn’t I want someone to shoo me when I get too close to the road?
Why do good things happen to good people? Who decides who is good and what happens to them? Is this all just random? Chaos theory? The boy talks to the rabbit – changes the time of its death. Adds time or takes away? Does it matter?
The asphalt glistened after days of rain, and tonight it struck me as profound.