Ruined Rabbit

This is a first draft. Do you think it’s long enough?

Ruined Rabbit: A Reflection on the Shootings of February Fourteenth

I don’t typically go in for omens and portents, but I was not surprised when something tragic and irrevocable happened that week. Ever since I had found the dead rabbit, early Monday morning, I had been unable to shake the certainty of approaching desolation.

That Monday morning, it was bitingly cold outside at five a.m., when I got out of bed to prepare for work. I was, at the time, a graduate teaching assistant at Northern Illinois University. I taught an eight a.m. class in English Composition, and I had a forty-five minute commute (on a good day), which is why I was up so early, letting my two dogs outside and turning on the coffee.

My first indication that something was not right was the fact that my two dogs, Skye and Whisky, didn’t want to come in. Usually, by the time I pour myself a cup of coffee, both of them are at the sliding glass door, furiously wagging to be let inside. Instead I could see them at the back of the yard, sniffing around one spot in the chain link fence. They were clearly agitated about something. They wouldn’t come in when I called them, and Whisky was pacing back and forth with her tail in the air, a sure sign that something was up. I slipped on my shoes and went out to see what the problem was. I was surprised to find the body of a dead rabbit stuck in the fence.

It had snowed several inches that weekend. The rabbit, who must have been used to darting under the fence whenever he wanted to get out of the yard, had evidently misjudged the height and wedged himself halfway through one of the links of the fence. This must have happened early the night before because his dead body appeared to be frozen solid. There was no way to pull him out of the fence. His powerful body, when alive, had propelled him over halfway through the diamond shaped link in the fence before his muscular lower half had become stuck in what must have been the most surprising and painful experience of his short life.

He couldn’t be pulled through, or back. There was only one thing I could do without ruining the fence. I shuffled through the snow until I found the large shovel I use to pick up dog crap. It was achingly cold outside. I had slipped my shoes on without any socks and now my bare ankles were covered with snow. I thought about going inside and getting properly dressed, but I just wanted to get it over with. The dead rabbit was close to a bush on the inside of the fence, so I jumped over with my shovel and squared off against his front half. It made me angry and depressed to find myself standing in the snow and the cold, wearing my NIU sweatpants and my NIU hoodie and chopping a dead rabbit in half with a shovel at five fifteen in the morning. But there was nothing else to do about it. If I left it there, the dogs would eat the damned thing and get sick with whatever diseases rabbits might carry. As I shoveled up the two halves of his body and walked them to the garbage can, I thought to myself, this is going to be a bad week.

The following Thursday afternoon, I was called from my study, where I was grading student essays. There had been some kind of shooting at the university. The shooter was down, or was roaming the campus, it wasn’t clear. It was on the news. I hurried to the television and, sure enough, there was Cole Hall being filmed from a helicopter. The screen had the word “live” in the upper left corner of the screen. A reporter was babbling about how much was not known at the time.

The first thought I had was about the only other memory I have related to Cole Hall. When I was a new undergraduate I got confused while trying to find a classroom and found myself in Cole Hall. Suddenly, as I was walking past a door to the auditorium, the door was thrown open and a guy wearing shorts and a tee-shirt emerged and puked into the drinking fountain.

Later, my students would tell me stories about mangled bodies being carried away in stretchers. They were on the ground, so to speak (one student of mine was even enrolled in that class) and experienced events as they happened. I was at home and could only watch events unfold on television as they wheeled stretchers with bodies on them to the ambulance that was parked in my usual parking space. I wondered, absurdly, if campus parking services would give the ambulance a ticket if it didn’t have a yellow parking pass. I thought about the rabbit, and wondered, not for the first time in my life, if significant events can somehow reverberate through time. If so, I thought, then which primary tragedy caused which antecedent event? Did an innocent rabbit get stuck in my fence because of the shooting that would occur three days in the future? Or did the shooting somehow occur as the result of the innocent rabbit I had to chop in half with a shovel? I suppose, given the grand scale of the universe, it could probably be either one.

I sat around the house for a week and a half waiting for the university to reopen. I kept in touch with my students through email. Later, I would be surprised to learn that not every teacher did this. Before classes resumed, we had a day of meetings where we heard talks from “experts.” These meetings were pretty much useless. The only information they had to go on was the Virginia Tech shootings a year earlier. They could tell us with certainty that our students may or may not feel a range of emotions and may or may not want to talk about it. Any teacher who gave a shit, probably already knew this.

The rest of the semester was a wash. I revised my syllabus to accommodate any students who might have post traumatic stress disorder. The result of this was that almost my entire class received A’s, which is frowned upon by the school. Students are expected to conform to a bell curve, but who cares. Any student who made it through that semester without giving up deserves an A, in my opinion, and, in spite of the fact that I have a properly filled out grade sheet, those little marks in the book have been far from my mind for a long time.

I didn’t personally know any of the students who were killed in the shooting on February fourteenth, but I often think about that rabbit and that bitter cold morning. It’s June as I write this. The air is warm and humid. A red breasted robin has built a nest outside my office window. Two days ago, her chicks finally hatched and now I spend my mornings, when I should be writing, just watching her feed them. She must be used to my presence, because she doesn’t fly away when I approach, but only sits with her chicks and eyes me warily, as if I might, or might not, portend her destruction.