The Killing of a Rabbit

I can still feel the incandescent fiery heat burning through the sleeves of my tattered winter coat.

I can still feel the inferno of the house fire creeping it’s malevolent hand up my spine and tickling at the hairs on the back of my neck.

I can still hear Augustus’s screams of dismay as the wicked flames devour him whole on the floor above me.

I am still there, even now. As I crouch in this bitter cold, shielding myself from behind a stunted bank of snow piled up against a long ago dead oak tree.

See, in this altered world, I’ve certainly learned a thing or two that I’m not quite proud of. I’ve been forced to adapt like a shark who got dropped off in the Dead Sea. But, the most important skill I’ve began to foster almost daily, is the use of compartmentalization.

Because ruminating about that grisly day when the Earth’s cities turned to ruins and the demise of my late husband, all the while trying to hunt the only food I’ve seen in days, is not the ideal way to survive.

So I push those memories back into a trinket box hidden inside a somber corner of my mind and twist it’s key into the lock. Then I fire my arrow.

I cried the first time. And the second. But now it seems that seeing the white snow splattered with the crimson blood of a rabbit only means to my calloused heart that the hunger pains I’ve been feeling will be subsided for a day or two.

Augustus would have hated this. Whenever I saw a spider or wasp in the house he’d always drop what he was doing and spend the next five or so minutes trying to secure it under a coffee mug so he could release it outside. Now, here I am, hunting. But this is not the time or place to feel ashamed.

It happened on a Tuesday afternoon. Augustus was perched in my favorite sage-green velvet chair in our reading nook, skimming the pages of an old library book. I had just gone down into the cellar to fetch a hand mixer to stir the eggs and flour for the pastries I was baking.

If it wasn’t for those damn lavender lemon scones, I would have gone with him.

At the time, I recall standing on the damp stone floor of the cellar. The mixer fallen to the ground in front of my bare feet and my mind pleading with me to do something. To run up the stairs and cease his screams of terror with a kiss. To die with him.

But my feet were heavy to the ground like they were made of cement. So, against every stab of guilt to my heart, I simply stood frozen until the screaming subsided. Then, in the frigid silence, I climbed out a narrow rectangular window onto wilted grass.

I will never be able to close my eyes and not see the horrid sight of the world on fire before me. It’s image is burned into the backs of my eyelids.

It doesn’t get any easier. Well, I suppose, some things do. Like the killing of a rabbit.

But the emptiness you feel from the loss of a loved one, in a world that has no means to fill those holes, only leaves the wounds to rot and fester. For the person to become something of a saint inside your mind.

See, the dead cannot make any mistakes. They can not hurt your feelings. They can not annoy you on a trip to the grocery store.

Augustus has surely become a glorified version of himself since he faded from flesh to ash and memories living inside my head. Sitting up high on his pedestal in the sky. Telling me not to kill rabbits.

I bend down to pull my handcrafted arrow out from the prey in which I’ve taken, when something gilt gold and gleaming falls from my neck and onto the freshly painted snow.

The heart shaped locket that Augustus once gifted me in an antique velour box now lays on a bed of my wrong-doing.

Glaring up at me as yet another harsh reminder that this world is no longer hearts and flowers.

It is no longer hand holding and evening forest walks. It has shifted into something that I fear is almost entirely cold blooded.

So, as I lay by the fire that night with my stomach full, I stare at the small faded photo of him inside the locket’s heart for as long as I can will myself to.

Then I toss it into the flames.