The Rabbits

by J.A. Tyler

There was a pop and some red, nothing else. It was a video my dad ordered over the phone, telling the operator YES. YES. YES, and then a string of numbers.

Here they run from bush to bush, covering themselves from us, our walking, the strollers and wagons and all the ways they know we accidentally crush them. Hiding in the lawn, here, the other zoo animals unnoticing them, their tiny rabbit bodies.

SEE. THEY JUST PEEL IT OFF. And they do, in my dad’s video, their rabbit skin coming off of them like a coat, unzipping and coming off their shoulders.

The heads have been chopped off, these rabbits in this video of my dad’s. They are headless, these rabbits.

WHERE ARE THEIR HEADS? I ask. GONE he says.

Gone, these rabbits, their heads.

I WANT TO KEEP MY HEAD I tell him, my dad watching this video, where the meat comes off the bones. BE CAREFUL THEN he says, headless rabbits on the screen, the ones that I guess weren’t careful enough.


J. A. Tyler is the author of the forthcoming novella SOMEONE, SOMEWHERE (ghost road press) and the chapbooks THE GIRL IN THE BLACK SWEATER (Trainwreck Press) and EVERYONE IN THIS IS EITHER DYING OR WILL DIE OR IS THINKING OF DEATH (Achilles Chapbook Series). He is also founding editor of mud luscious / ml press and was recently nominated for a Pushcart. Find more info here: www.aboutjatyler.blogspot.com.