My dad took me on a hunting trip when I was a kid and I cradled a dead rabbit in my arms. 

We’d used ferrets to chase them out of their hole and into a net, where my dad and his buddies grabbed them by the scruff of their nape, their appendages suddenly affected by gravity, and opened their neck with a box cutter.

They were going to eat themselves to death, some were mangey, and they weren’t the sort of rabbits you see in pet stores or perched in a calendar. I’d be lying to you if I said I found some sort of innocence in these creatures, I think I was only confronted by the fact that i was utterly incapable of finding anything of myself in them. 

One was obviously diseased, its spittle collected in dew as it lay on the ground and the thin skin around its discolored belly became bloated, like a blade of grass would break the surface tension and all the water that had been stagnating in its body for too long would spill out. 

Another was pregnant, and unwounding it left foetuses daisy-chained on the dirt, soil magnetised in clumps to the declining moisture of their non-developed skin. Some dog scarfed them up before I could commit the image to memory. It’s like they never had the opportunity to grow what divides a bridge from a fall, or their organs from the rest of the world.

Id like to tell you that I was so sensitive that I couldn’t handle it, where I could revel in my childhood empathy and demonstrate that yes in fact, I am capable of inconsolability. But If anything I was hypnotised, I held one in my arms the same way a mother holds a child and the blood from its wound pooled down my shirt and onto my stomach.

i was told to stick my fingers into the wound, which was longer than its body could permit. Its warmth traveled through me to to the top of my chest, It’s horrible how long something stays warm after it dies. 

I feel like so much less of a man than I ever could be. I look at my dad, and how this casual cruelty blows off him, how he’s changed his accent for these old country friends.
I don’t think any less of him for it, I still love him more than I can describe. But in a way It’s almost a mercy that we’ll never really have to know each other. 

I can stare in his eyes and he can stare back but we don’t have to confront the fact that I’ll never really be the son he wants, or a son at all. Or the fact we both know I find no joy, no boy-hood excitement in this exercise. The divide between us grows and I realise that I can stare Into someone’s eyes and we can look straight through each other.

But every-time I cough, or argue, or become frustrated in my patience I am reminded I am slowly becoming him. 


The only time I’m not is when I’m holding a dead rabbit in my arms.