Short Story: The Great Bunny Escape
As a mother, I often find myself looking back on my own childhood memories. I try to analyze them, because I try to analyze nearly everything, but the only conclusion I’ve come to is that there are many versions of the exact same memory.
Kind of like a coin. There are two sides, each with a different story behind it, each true. As time moves on, that pristine coin will show signs of wear. Perhaps the edges will soften, there may be dirt in the crevices, or maybe it’s stuck in the mud altogether.
But the magic of it is that when you flip a coin, you might get something different every time.
My memory is a bit like that sometimes.
I think about all the things I remember as a child, and then I flip it around and think about whether or not those memories are really true, or if they’re just innocent child interpretations. Now that I’m a parent, I also think about how my parents might have participated in certain memories or events.
Sometimes it changes things, but sometimes it makes things a bit more magical.
Take, for example, the time our pet rabbit escaped in the backyard.
I don’t really remember the rabbit itself - we had so many over the years. Peter, Bunny, Thumper, Barbie - who knows which rabbit it was that escaped this time. Was it white? Grey? Brown? Marbled? A he or a she? Old or young? Those are the details that are lost. I doubt I’ll ever get them back, and truly, that’s alright, because why on Earth do I need to remember those things?
What I do remember was that it was a sunny day, perhaps spring or summer. The grass was green, the sky was blue, and I wasn’t wearing a heavy coat. I’m not sure when we discovered that the rabbit was missing, but somewhere along the way, we realized the rabbit was missing.
We - I say “we” because, while I can’t remember who it was exactly, I do know there were other people there. Young people. Maybe friends or cousins or neighbors. I remember the childlike giddiness that bubbles out of children en masse when there’s a mystery to be solved.
My father was home. That didn’t mean it was the weekend, since he worked shifts, but he was there, and he played a very intrical part in recapturing the rabbit.
At first the rabbit was running around the backyard. THERE! Just behind the wood pile! QUICK! Somebody grab him!
But we wouldn’t grab him. Have you ever tried to grab a running rabbit? Yea, why would you. I’ll tell you though, it is NOT easy.
We chased the rabbit through the yard. Behind wood piles and sheds, into the bushes (but not too far in, for me, since there are bugs. Ick), under the deck, and then, finally, under the fence and out across the front yard. It went dashing across the street into the neighbor’s yard. Ah, yes, I remember now, my neighbor, who is my age, was with us. He was part of the Rabbit Recapture Crew. So off we went into his yard. THERE! Behind the tree!!!!
NO! Little bunny! Don’t cross the street!!! Ack. We all lined up along the curb and watched as a tiny white cotton ball of a tail disappeared into the bush across the street, at another neighbor’s house. And old man’s house. We didn’t know the old man. We couldn’t search around his yard.
But we’d seen shows. We knew how it was done. You could leave a trail of carrots. Carrots are rabbits favorite snack - they can’t resist them.
Yes. You leave a trail of carrots back down the street, across two yards, through my own front yard, and into my backyard where a trap was set up.
It was the most brilliant plan. My father helped us build the trap, too. He was in on it. He wanted our rabbit back as much as I did. It was his idea to take a shoe box and prop it up on a stick, just like in the cartoons. And since my dad was a fisherman, he had lots of fishing line - that stuff is pretty much invisible, that’s how you catch the fish.
So we used the fishing line and tied a knot around the stick that propped up the shoe box, and then we unwound the line so we could all hide behind the corner on the house. We laid out TONS of carrots, with a entire whole carrot right under the shoe box. As soon as that rabbit would come and eat the carrot, we’d pull the line, knock the stick off, and the shoebox would fall and trap the rabbit.
Easy, peasy, pumpkin squeezy. Or something like that.
I remember the excitement so vividly. If I think about it hard enough, I can feel it bubbling in my tummy. I remember a crew of kids, and my dad at the helm, waiting for that rabbit to come claim its carrot.
And you know what’s crazy? I have no idea how it happened, but we caught that rabbit. We got our pet rabbit back. It came for the carrot. We pulled the fish line and the box dropped right on top of that rabbit.
As an adult, the memory seems impossible. The whole thing seems impossible. How can a bunch of kids actually catch a runaway pet rabbit that’s sprinting for its freedom along the streets of suburban Long Island? How long could we possibly have waited, just staring at the box trap? WHERE DID ALL THOSE CARROTS COME FROM? How did my father have the patience? (that’s the real kicker for me to think about as an adult, especially knowing my dad).
Or is the real story on the flip side of a coin? Is the real story less adventurous? Perhaps my father just put a different rabbit in the box? We had lots of rabbits, it’s plausible.
Even if there’s some mundane, boring story that’s true in reality. It’ll never be true to me. To me, to my memory, I have a story to tell, and it’s the story of the great bunny escape.
For more from Jackie, follow @jackiemangiolino
