My dog killed a rabbit. Not just any rabbit but a cute, tiny, innocent baby rabbit that was fluffy and soft. The symbol of abundance ripped from its home and snapped at the neck. Or at least, that is what my neighbor said.
This all began with Patsy Cline, my wire hair terrier mutt. Her looks bring to mind a dog on an animal shelter commercial- blonde, cute, and disheveled, like she just fell out of a dumpster and onto my couch. When I first picked her up from the overflow shelter, she screamed and whaled the entire 45-minute drive home. I looked at her scared face behind the wire door of her crate and said, “You sing sad songs. I will call you Patsy Cline.”
In hindsight, I should have called her Houdini because of her ability to escape. Escaped her crate, lashing and clawing at the latch until it popped open, and she pushed open the door with her cute little button nose. Escaped through the front door if anyone dared to leave it open for half a second too long. Escaped every single fenced in yard that she was placed in like it was her job to do so. Escaped through the drainage pipe, crawling, and digging her way through to the end where she magically popped out down the street. But she always came back after exerting her freedom.
Patsy Cline’s independent spirit was never an issue when we lived in the open country. She wore a dirt path around the perimeter of our property, took runs through the forest while I was at work, and later laid sleeping in the sun comfortably on the porch. Sometimes, she ventured to our neighbor’s house, and they often invited her inside, where she inevitably ate snacks while sitting on their recliner. I know this because they sent me pictures. But now we live in Asheville, and people are concerned for her. Mostly my neighbors. They often show up knocking on my door to let me know she is out again. Looks of condemnation across their face as they say, again. When I explained not to worry because she would come back, and definitely don’t try to catch her because she will not let you, the looks turned into more of a grimace. It was futile to explain that she was a wild animal raised like myself, in the open without a fence or leash, because they never understood. I tried to rationalize that after thirteen years together, the closest I ever came to domesticating her was that when she was ready to sleep, she would lay down at the foot of my bed, but that didn’t register with them either. All they saw was a bad dog parent and even worse neighbor.
The day in question about the alleged rabbit killing was not unlike any others. Patsy Cline had darted through a door held open too long by my 4-year-old, and off she went on a freedom run to clear her soul and her mind of the constant hum of modern life in the city. My voice in the background hailing her home must have sounded like music on her running playlist because off she went. I didn’t think much about it. She always comes back. Thirty minutes later, I went outside to grab something out of my car, and I saw a neighbor from two houses down, shewing and swatting at something in our mutual neighbor’s yellow Forsythia bush. It was a prize shrub, the first sign of spring, and the size of a car. So full of small yellow flowers that its branches draped towards the ground. Like a flash, I saw Patsy Cline flush out from beneath it.
“Is that your dog?” He screamed at me while trying to catch Patsy Cline. We had been neighbors for three years and he was wondering if that was my dog. Had he not seen her pissing in his yard? Had he not seen her riding in the front seat of my car with her head out of the window with the wind blowing through her hair? Had he not seen her sitting on our front porch with my child. Had he not seen US?
“Yes.” I yelled back.
“Well, she just killed a baby rabbit!”
Animated and clearly pissed off, he darted around the shrub trying to keep Patsy Cline out. I looked around at the thousands of rabbits jumping around our neighborhood and tried to understand why he was so upset. I was working on developing empathy, but I must have still been in the early stages.
“Get your dog!” He yelled, with his vitriolic voice.
At some point, anger showed up inside of me. I felt it climbing up chest and face. My skin turned as red as a vine of Virgina Creeper in the fall, and the lines on my forehead carved deep in as my face squinted. It had less to do with the rabbit situation and more to do with this neighbor, who had never spoken, waved, or acknowledged my family’s existence in three years of living within 100 yards of each other, but had decided that it was acceptable to yell at me over a baby rabbit. Not to issue blame or anything, but he was standing on someone else’s property in his white New Balance dad shoes. Isn’t that trespassing? Or at least a fashion crime?
Patsy Cline ran across the street and scratched at our door while standing at my feet. I looked across at my neighbor one last time before going inside, and a large orange Tabby cat burst out from beneath the shrub.
I said, “Okay,” and closed the door behind us because what else was there to say?
***
The day started off rocky, with my husband and I running through the airport trying to catch our flight. The security line wrapped around each of the retractable line dividers and backed down the hallway in front of the ticketing counter. When I finally made it to the carry-on scanners, I heard my name over the loudspeaker. “E. Odom, please report to your gate.”
I looked at the security guard and said, “They’re calling my name!”
To which he responded, “I don’t care.”
“Okay,” I said, because what else was there to say?
I couldn’t help but feel that this was some sort of rabbit killer karma, but I didn’t have time to dwell on it as I ran to my gate, which luckily in Asheville was only 50 feet away. I boarded the plane and took my seat next to my husband just before they closed the door. This was our first vacation without our child, and we were going to Seattle to stay on a boat house on Lake Union. I needed this time. I was tired and needed a break from kid songs and toys and endless laundry. I leaned back in my seat and pulled out my book. Seated in the middle of a row of three, I took my husband’s hand and inhaled a breath of relief that we made it. I fought the urge to tell him that I was right: we should have left home an hour earlier, but I didn’t want to be miffed. What I wanted was to be on vacation, so I let it go, and asked the stewardess for a glass of wine.
The woman to my left, pulled out a stuffed animal. It was a rabbit. She was an older lady with looks that reminded me of Margaret Attwood, with her curly gray hair pulled back away from her face. She wore a soft sweater. Curious, I watched her pat her rabbit with her thin hands. The rabbit was brown, wore a cable knit sweater similar to hers, had long floppy ears, and eyes sewed on. It reminded me of something my son slept with at home. She whispered in his ear, and I immediately put in my headphones and thought, nope, nope, nope, I don’t want anything to do with that. I deflected my attention with music, books, wine, husband, anything other than a grown woman talking to a stuffed animal. Occasionally, I watched out of the corner of my eye as she gave the rabbit the play by play of the geography that we flew over. Of course, the rabbit got the window seat, and I was stuck in the middle.
Mid-flight, the woman tapped on my shoulder, and I politely removed my headphones. She offered me the rabbit to hold as if she saw that I needed an emotional support animal.
“Oh, no thank you,” I said.
I didn’t want to talk to the rabbit or the lady, but I listened when she explained the inflight snacks to the bunny. This was surely rabbit killer karma. What else could it be?
“These are pretzels and not good for bunnies,” she said, wagging her finger in a no signal.
I made the entire flight without too much engagement as I had stayed hidden behind my electronics, but predictably we had a long taxi. There we were, shoulder to shoulder, with no buffer or distractions. She evoked normal pleasantries, “How are you?” and “Where are you from?” For an adult welding a stuffed animal, she was articulate. I was surprised to find her normal, timid, and not wildly natured, even though she did not let go of her bunny the entire flight. It felt too personal to ask why she had a stuffed animal that she talked to, so I pretended it didn’t happen. Although I know using the silent treatment and ignoring things is not the best policy for life, at that moment it felt right. She asked questions about our lives and how we liked living in Asheville. She explained that she was considering moving to Asheville. I looked her at as she gently stroked her rabbit and said,
“I think you both would love it there.”
***
“He killed a rabbit.”
“He did what?” I asked, confused.
“Shot a rabbit,” my friend Suzy repeated, referring to her neighbor standing in front of us.
“Here?” I asked. I looked at her perplexed.
We were standing on a dock in an affluent Seattle neighborhood. Multi-million-dollar homes stood gloriously overlooking Lake Union. West Coast architecture with no air conditioning units in sight. Huge yachts sailed by in front of us while puddle jumpers took off to the skies. We stayed at Suzy’s boat house while we were visiting, like the ones I’d see in the movie Sleepless in Seattle, floating on the canals in Amsterdam, or on the clay banks of Lake Fontana. Suzy and I are from the same rural hometown of Robbinsville, North Carolina, and both grew up in the woods. We share a certain common understanding of the world and home, even if we only visit there occasionally.
“Yeah, that’s my house over there.” He pointed a few houses down.
I generally have no qualms with people hunting for food. I don’t make the distinction that grocery store packaged meat on a Styrofoam plate wrapped in cellophane by a butcher is okay, while wild game harvested by the hands of a hunter is barbaric. Meat is meat, and I am not removing myself from the reality of how it got to my plate. Fresh venison is one of my favorite meals. But affluent Seattle was vastly different than the woods of North Carolina. I looked at her neighbor waiting for an explanation. Something to explain what happened or at least a comedic twist and punchline to this tale he was spinning.
“Those damn things are everywhere,” he said.
Fair enough. They do have a reputation for reproductive proclivity. Again, with the rabbits, I thought to myself.
The neighbor was an older man, and I had the feeling that he was testing boundaries and perhaps pushing back against the inevitability of life. Also, it was possible that he was simply bored, quiddling through his day. Maybe he thought- What am I going to do today? Maybe I’ll go paddling boarding again…Maybe I’ll go for a hike… Maybe I’ll kill that pesky rabbit…Maybe I’ll go to Whole Foods and look for a new cheese…I think today is the rabbit’s last!
“If anyone would’ve seen you, they would’ve lost their minds,” Suzy said.
He laughed at this. He loved it. Clearly, delighted with this whole story that he had told multiple times.
“Oh, yeah. The people in this neighborhood would call the cops for sure,” he said.
“Well, what did you do with it?” I asked, trying to connect the dots of all of my rabbit stories and somehow make sense of why I was experiencing this. What was the universe trying to tell me and does the universe care about rabbits? Was this the year of the rabbit? And if so, what did that even mean? Did I need to call my mom more? What was happening?
“I ate it,” he said. “I mean it’s organic. Damn thing ate all the lettuce in my garden.”
The image of the farmer with a shotgun in the children’s story, Peter the Rabbit, came to mind as I recently watched it with my son, and I thought of the parent killed in the story, and their children now all alone. And I thought of all those baby rabbits running around this neighborhood and my neighborhood across the country, and my child 2,681 miles away without his parents, and Patsy Cline snatching baby rabbits or maybe it was the cat, and the old woman clenching her rabbit close to her chest on the plane. And these images, thoughts, and feelings collided together, spinning, and sparking into something new. With all the fortitude that I could muster, I forced it all out of my mind. I was on vacation and not going down that dark existential rabbit hole. I focused.
“You shot a gun in this neighborhood? How?” I asked, forcing myself to reframe while still trying to process the event that occurred and make sense of it all. The density of people here produced a basic safety issue with firing a gun. A puddle jumper buzzed nearby, and my attention turned to watching it glide down onto the water’s surface. Waves broke off of its landing floats and cascaded into other water. Water folded into water, until there were no waves left. Watching the beauty of a wave moving to stillness made me feel at peace, and a piece of this interconnected world.
“Oh, it was just a pellet gun,” he said. “I do it all the time.”
He put down his craft beer, walked to the edge of the dock. With his head up and shoulders back, he jumped into the cold dark water with blissful indifference and temerity and didn’t look back.
I said, “Okay,” because what else was there to say?
