visible deaths of rabbits
I remembered they all drowned. In uncertainty, in turmoil they drowned and yet I was alive breathing somehow with a major crack in the frontal bone. A lot was bleeding through it. I remember everything getting blurry before everyone started to act queer around me.
This is a paradox that is all I can put.
Imagine walking on a road covered with forest on both sides and you come across five rabbits crushed mercilessly by a truck and a man far away in a poultry house is filling those rabbits’ lunch in a bowl.
Why isn’t he turning around and embracing the truth that they are in fact dead? Are they not quite dead? Or the man shocked enough to believe they are dead?
I hurried my way home.
Walking faster believing my feet can take me away from this scene.
I say that I am just a normal female who got her bachelor's and masters in English in the same town I grew up in. I have had a job in the same town. I was taking care of my parents and adopted two toddlers. My brother was also living with us. No sooner did I had a job than the company burned down in flames. I don’t remember but it was a similar accident.
I woke up in a place and found my limbs strangled to a hospital bed. My sweet, ever-kind brother explained that I was acting strange these weeks that’s why they did this to me.
I have no recollection of my queer activities. He told me I would extend my walks outside town and will complain of about five dead rabbits.
We were rained with a kind request to live in a house outside the town. It was a beautiful house with two storeys. The second storey had two or three rooms, I am not sure. We had arguments about this condition. Every morning, I would find the house somehow shifted more to the right than it was yesterday. Somehow the third room would appear and would disappear like a breath. It was a little narrow passage. It would vanquish and come back.
I would go out to walk. I used to walk far outside in the forest. I was somehow led to these five rabbits mercilessly crushed by a truck with the truck slowly dopplering out in distance. The man, however, was filling their bowl with food. He was not turning back. He was not ready.
Yet.
I was again crippled with insecurity about knowing the uncertainty of these animals being alive or dead or the man in distance with the food and unsure he is feeding to dead animals. These streets started to scare me like the two storey house.
I fastened my way but to where. I didn’t want to be in the house. I planned to burn it. I imagined it all in my head. I would burn the house and at the perfect moment, I will call the kids and my brother and my parents out. I would burn this house.
I wanted it to be natural so I started with cooking my own food on the terrace. No one minded. No-one stopped me either. In the middle of the night, I went on the terrace and took a burning piece of wood. I entered the hall and started to set the couch on fire but it would go out. I went to the terrace again but it was raining. So, I set loose the wrong knob. A knob that would stop the water from flowing through the pipe that opened in the kitchen sink. All the water from harvester started to empty in rooms as fast as a cyclone. My brother was awakened by this noise and he came out to protect me from drowning and let me out of the house and went inside again. I fell from the stairs.
Again, I found myself in hospital repairing from the head and lung injury.
I asked the nurse whether my family was okay. She hushed me. that’s how I got to know they were dead. Drowned in confusion.
Maybe I am still in my hall with the charcoal in my hand and staring at the thin air.
Maybe I am still not anywhere I was supposed to be.
Maybe I am already dead.
What, exactly this thought, does make me?
Make me believe that there isn’t anyone dead behind me.
Make me trust that these rabbits were never dead.
If you can, then, in fact, we both know that anything at all is possible.
