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Photograph by guest arts editor, Colin Grubel. <\/em>
\n Read about the art selection process for this piece here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

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Watch this piece performed live<\/a>\u00a0by performer Ken Simon.<\/p>\n

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My kids have a pair of bunny rabbits. The pair used to be a trio, but we lost one after it suffered an anal prolapse. If you\u2019re wondering what an anal prolapse is, imagine what you have to do to a sock to make it an inside-out sock. That\u2019s what happened to the business end of my kids\u2019 third and now expired bunny rabbit.<\/p>\n

An \u201canal prolapse\u201d is an accurate metaphor for how I have generally felt about these pets. I have resented these bunny rabbits, at times even hated them.\u00a0 To be more specific, these bunny rabbits are Holland Lops, and we keep them in a bunny hutch. I don\u2019t call it a bunny hutch, though. I call it a house of ill repute since house-of-ill-repute-like activities are mostly what goes on inside. Well, that and a lot of eating. Holland Lops are essentially stuffed animals that must be fed. But there\u2019s something about them \u2013 a vacant, passive-aggressive quality \u2013 that has always made them seem like they\u2019re holding me in judgment.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve recently gone to therapy for depression, details of which I won\u2019t get into here except to say that I\u2019ve learned something I should have realized, being a screenwriter and all, but for whatever reason didn\u2019t, and it\u2019s this \u2013 what I\u2019m feeling ain\u2019t always what I\u2019m feeling. Ergo my anal prolaptic feelings toward my kids\u2019 bunnies weren\u2019t really about the bunnies.<\/p>\n

Having talk-therapied my way into this realization, I brainstormed likely causes for my pathological bunny rabbit angst. I ran down the list of familiar rabbits. Bugs Bunny? I never connected with him; I was more of a Foghorn Leghorn man. Harvey? That movie often played at my grandma\u2019s house, usually before or after The Sound of Music. I found the prospect of being holed up with a nun and forced to sing about brown paper packages and copper kettles way more unsettling than a six-foot invisible rabbit.<\/p>\n

I continued rounding up the usual suspects: Thumper? Peter Rabbit? Ralphie from A Christmas Story<\/em><\/span> in his pink nightmare bunny getup? The Velveteen Rabbit? The Easter Bunny? No, these were all benevolent, even joyful associations. I went further. Bunnicula, the Howe and Howe children\u2019s book series about a vampire rabbit who sucks the juice out of vegetables? Too innocuous. Night of the Lepus<\/em><\/span>, the 1972 horror thriller about giant mutant rabbits that terrorize the southwest? Too campy. No, these feelings had teeth. They were based in reality, and I knew I\u2019d need to dig deeper.<\/p>\n

It was that thought \u2013 digging deeper \u2013 that unearthed the memory of a shovel and brought everything to the surface. I was seventeen and still living with my parents in Lake Elsinore. Desert hills and fields of foxtails surrounded our home on all sides. Coyotes, rattlesnakes, barn owls, and other bloodthirsty wildlife were not uncommon. Which made our dogs a necessity.<\/p>\n

We had a Chocolate Lab named Red Dog and a St. Bernard named Nanna. They were not good dogs. Sweet? Sure. But obedient? There ought to be stories about these dogs in the Old Testament.<\/p>\n

It is<\/em> possible, though, that our commands were too complicated, too wordy for canine savvy:<\/p>\n

\u201cQuit shoving your noses into Grandma Doe Doe\u2019s bajingo!\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cFetch me the funny papers but only if it excludes The Family Circus<\/em><\/span> and\/or Includes Calvin and Hobbes<\/em><\/span>!\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cStop pursuing that bunny rabbit between the Maytag washer and dryer!\u201d<\/p>\n

It was this last command that brings us to my ordeal. After chasing Red Dog and Nanna out of our outdoor laundry room, which they had effectively destroyed, yanking the dryer from its connections and trampling a load of clean whites, my mother and I settled our eyes on a bunny rabbit \u2013 dirty white, covered in slobber, and barely able to compete with a grapefruit in the size department. It cowered against the wall. A closer look revealed that he was missing his tail and most of his driver\u2019s side rear leg. I remember thinking, So much for the bit about the lucky rabbit\u2019s foot<\/em>. And then thinking, There\u2019s really no such thing as a lucky rabbit\u2019s foot if you\u2019re the rabbit<\/em>.<\/p>\n

I wasn\u2019t a vet. I had neither the education nor the vocabulary to diagnose or treat anal prolapses let alone gaping lacerations or limbs nearly cleaved from bodies. Still, I could tell that the prognosis was grim, the kind you should expect if you\u2019ve been smoking since your first sock hop or if your last name is Kennedy. My mom said we\u2019d need to put it out of its misery, and by we<\/em> she meant me<\/em>. This was a woman who I had personally seen rush into the melee of a gang fight to help break it up. And, yes, the same woman who could debone a twenty-five pound turkey barehanded in five minutes flat. Yet she was too queasy to, in her words, \u201cdo the humane thing.\u201d<\/p>\n

I scooped the bunny rabbit up with a piece of cardboard and walked it out to a field across from our house. On that walk, I entertained optimism. The rabbit could be okay. After all, it wasn\u2019t squealing. In fact, it seemed stoic, as if it had been coached by John Wooden.<\/p>\n

I gently set the bunny rabbit down in the ankle-high weeds and glanced at my watch. 10 minutes<\/em>, I thought. If he hops away, I\u2019ll reconsider my position on lucky rabbit feet. If he doesn\u2019t, well, I\u2019ll have<\/em> a better understanding of Glenn Close\u2019s character in <\/em>Fatal Attraction<\/span><\/i>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Those ten minutes were a paradox \u2013 long and agonizing and jackrabbit quick all at once. He didn\u2019t move. Not one bunny hop. I thought I might give him a little more time, but my mom insisted that would be cruel. She gave me a shovel and no direction. The insinuation seemed to be that I should use said shovel to do the humane thing<\/em>. I stood over the bunny rabbit, feet squared, a little more than shoulder length apart, and raised the shovel overhead. The rabbit looked up at me, nose wiggling, stoic, yes, but also alive, eyes a-glimmer.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

My mom brought me a white dishtowel, which I laid over the bunny. I told myself it was the move of a benevolent executioner. My breathing was labored. I felt my eyes water.\u00a0 Again, I raised the shovel overhead. \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

You know that scene in The Princess Bride<\/em><\/span> when shrieking eels are thrashing toward Princess Buttercup, and Peter Falk stops the story to reassure Fred Savage that the shrieking eels don\u2019t, in fact, eat Buttercup? It\u2019s this sweet, protective grandfatherly moment, and I feel like the tension of this bunny rabbit execution could use a similar gimmick. Like, I break in here to tell you that the bunny rabbit turned out okay. His severed leg was merely a trick leg that snapped back into place just before he hopped away and went on to father 357 offspring and make a killing in the stock market. I should definitely do that. And I would \u2013 if I were a liar. The truth is there was no such luck.<\/p>\n

I stood over that towel-covered bunny, and I swung the shovel. Unfortunately, though, something interfered with my ability to put all two hundred pounds of my body into the swing. Perhaps it was the guilt or the shame or my na\u00efvet\u00e9 as it pertained to certain cruel truths of the world, but I pulled my punch, and instead of putting the rabbit out of its misery, I seemed to have activated the razor\u2019s edge of its fight-or-flight response. The poor thing began hopping, one-legged, beneath the white dish towel, a little hippity-hoppity drunken ghost, its shrieks eerily similar to a horrified child.<\/p>\n

My mom witnessed all of this and offered direction from the sidelines: \u201cOh, Norm, get it! Get it! Don\u2019t let it suffer! Oh, god love it!\u201d As she spoke, she seesawed between hysterical laughter and sincere weeping. Her laughs might seem horrible, but you have to remember she was witnessing the most macabre and dissatisfying game of whack-a-mole ever played.<\/p>\n

This I believed to be the reason I held such contempt for my kids\u2019 bunny rabbits \u2013 my residual shame and guilt projected onto their floppy little faces. But if that were true, the realization would have resolved those feelings, wouldn\u2019t they? Yet I still hated the bunny rabbits and descended yet even further into depression.<\/p>\n

If you\u2019ve never experienced depression, it feels a little like this: a gloomy film washes over everything, and you cease to operate in a reality that agrees with everyone else\u2019s. Basically, your mind and your heart interpret things in a fashion not unlike Corey Feldman\u2019s Spanish-speaking character \u201cMouth\u201d in The Goonies<\/em><\/span>. They lie, they exaggerate, they delude. Someone might say, \u201cI love you, Norm,\u201d and they might very well mean it, but neither my brain nor my heart can hear it. Instead, the pair of them harden and pass judgment. \u201cOf course, you love me. You\u2019re too inept to know better. You probably like Ayn Rand novels and listen to Coldplay.\u201d Of course, I should concede that every depressed person\u2019s experience is likely different than mine, but I am relatively sure that, unchecked, it can lead to the darkest of places.<\/p>\n

Mine certainly did. I always thought of myself as a duck, sailing smoothly across the water, never allowing anyone to see past the surface where my feet were paddling like mad, trying to manage a lifetime of guilt, trying to hide feelings of worthlessness and phoniness, trying to keep people from loving me because they might learn what I felt in my heart and mind to be true \u2013 that I was unlovable.<\/p>\n

This depression bottomed out at a Mexican restaurant called Avila\u2019s. My wife, Becky, and I used to take the kids there every Sunday night, and one Sunday night I could no longer pretend I was a duck. Becky saw as much when she looked at me. \u201cAre you okay?\u201d she said. The next minute or so is a little funny in my memory, but I vaguely remember hearing in my periphery a kindergarten-aged girl telling her mom at full volume, \u201cMommy, that large man with the beard is crying.\u201d<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve heard that rabbits only make one sound, a sort of shriek when they\u2019re about to become prey. This is partially true. They make many sounds, cheerful ones even, but they do scream under extreme duress, and when they scream, it\u2019s never a false alarm. Well, I was a rabbit in that moment, and I felt the world raising its shovel over my head. The last thing I needed was a busybody five-year-old.<\/p>\n

But just before I could scream, \u201cShut up, kindergartener and eat your guacamole! Don\u2019t you know I\u2019m a killer of bunny rabbits!\u201d my wife said an incredibly loving thing to me: \u201cOh, my god,\u201d she said. \u201cYou\u2019re not okay.\u201d<\/p>\n

All right, so you probably won\u2019t come across those words in a Shakespearean sonnet, but they were the kind of words that looked beyond the surface and recognized the emotional and psychological wounds that were akin to a one-legged rabbit with its haunches in the jaws of a disobedient hellhound. They brought focus to that gloomy film that had washed over me. Soon after those words, I had an epiphany: my longstanding resentment and hatred for the bunny rabbits was nothing but a mirror. Like them, I was emotionless, caged up, pushing things down, deep, deep down, without a white towel to cover me, and my real emotions only spilled out once I heard the chaos of life and how it sounds eerily like a whack-a-mole arcade.<\/p>\n

My wife moves much quicker than I do emotionally, and after I shared this epiphany with her, she swelled up with hope and fired off a question: \u201cDoes this mean you love the bunnies now?\u201d<\/p>\n

The depression had lifted, but in terms of vulnerability, I was still living in a bunny hutch made of cards, and this question put that architectural integrity to the test. I recalled that the bunnies were a mirror, and if I hated them, it would mean I hated myself. It took a little time, but I can now say, as I write these words that I am a six-foot-two, 220-pound, beard-faced, bunny-loving man.<\/p>\n

Now I\u2019m not so naive as to believe that the depression can\u2019t return. Certainly, there\u2019s a shovel looming overhead, waiting to play whack-a-mole with my hobbled ego at any time. And there\u2019s little guarantee that making peace with a couple of dispassionate, promiscuous Holland Lops will help any of this. If nothing else, the rabbits will remind me to be a lot less hard on myself and a little more loving. Like I said, I\u2019m no vet, but if that isn\u2019t the cure for an anal prolapse, then there isn\u2019t one.<\/p>\n

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