I walked into the ER and snarled at the nurse, saying I had a case of rabbits. She took one look at me saying, Foaming at the mouth doesn’t generally come from rabbits. Do you mean rabies? She asked how I felt about having injections in my stomach. There was so much noise coming from outside the triage curtain, sounds I’d only heard in shows like Grey’s Anatomy. I told her I was open to anything, but again, I knew what had happened. I was out walking the night before with a telescope I’d stolen from the neighbor’s kid. Now before you get up in arms about theft, I will let you know he was using to spy on the college girls changing through their window across the street. The little creep. I’d heard there was going to be a meteor shower and found a nice spot on the hillside in the park down the street. It was a pretty nice telescope, I swore I could even see things entering and exiting the moon. When took my eye off the sky, there it was, at my feet: a fluffy doe-colored jack rabbit. I said Hey Mr. Rabbit did you come to watch the meteor shower? when it sunk its two buck teeth through my Converse. I learned two things: 1) never assume a rabbit follows astronomy, 2) they bite with more force that you’d expect.
They ran a bunch of tests. In the process I swallowed two tongue depressors, half of a blood pressure cuff, and somehow lodged an IV needle in my throat. The X-ray tech’s skin was rather salty, I could taste the sodium chloride from the beef jerky he’d eaten before starting his shift. Some young doctor my age pushed through the privacy curtain. He adjusted his coke bottle glasses and flipped through my chart. I didn’t realize they could assemble so much information on me in such a short amount of time, but they did. He searched his pocket protector for a pen as he tried to pronounce my last name. I imagine he’d studied hard and missed out on a lot of parties to get to this point in life. I asked if I could call him Doc; he didn’t mind. When Doc looked at my films, there were indeed rabbits. I knew there’d been at least two when I arrived, each with their own style: one kicked, one clawed. Now there were twenty. Doc asked the nurse to page the on-call magician. I lay on the cold bed; the sanitary paper swished under my feet. I could feel the clawing and kicking getting more intense, accompanied now by biting. No one was in a rush when I’d told them the problem earlier, but now they were bringing in more people wearing different ID badges, different colored scrubs; they even brought the hospital chaplain in which made me nervous.
The magician’s cape swished over me as he attempted to pull them out when I gagged on his hairy arms. He said he’d pulled a lot of rabbits out of different places on people, but never out of the stomach. Several attempts and a tray full of bloodied extraction tools later, he said I should go home and see if the rabbits worked themselves out. I must’ve run every stoplight and stop sign on the way home. I was afraid of getting pulled over and having to offer yet another explanation. I tried watching TV. Couldn’t eat, though I was craving carrots like a son of a gun. They all started kicking every time a dog outside barked, there must’ve been three times as many in there by that point, and my neighborhood has a ton of dogs. There wasn’t anyone I could call at that hour. What would I say? I’d be the butt-end of everyone’s jokes, asking me if I was carrying around any Trix in my pockets. Sleep was impossible. I pulled out the on-call magician’s business card from my wallet. The front had a printed picture of him with an assistant dressed like a glittering Ziegfeld Follies girl holding a saw that lengthwise went past her head. By that point I’d have done anything to get those things out. It was tempting.
I got a step stool out and searched the top shelf of my closet, pulling down a box of childhood keepsakes. I still had my board book collection and decided to read sagas out loud involving cabbage patches, velveteen, forbidden gardens, and farmers who weaponized rakes. When I shifted gears to talk about goodnight moons and eloping silverware, they finally came crawling out both ends. 10/10 do not recommend. I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy, not even the thing that had bitten me. There were so many in my living room I felt an obligation to start naming them, only with that came the problems of attachment. There are only so many variations of Mopsy, Flopsy, and Cottontail that you can use. I finally called it quits when I started coming up with names like Limpy.
