Fantastic Metropolis

I was in the kitchen, cleaning the window that looked out on the small concrete back yard of the row house one morning. The place had really been neglected and with all my time, I had begun a campaign to get it in shape. As I was looking out the window at the broken down gate that led to the alley, I saw something working its way through the hole at the bottom. It was black and white, and at first I thought it was a cocker spaniel. I went out the back door to check it out. It turned out to be the biggest rabbit I had ever seen in my life. This thing was the size of a small dog and had ears that dragged along the ground. My legs went weak and my fear was the kind that can easily make you contemplate the end of the world by meteor storm or a sudden vanishing of gravity.

I swear, I thought the creature was going to talk to me. “No fucking way,” I said. “No way.” The whole thing was so absurd. A huge rabbit running around amidst a bunch of row houses in South Philly? I barely kept it together. I ran inside and called the ASPCA. They asked me if it was hurt, and I told them no. “There’s nothing that can be done,” they said. I hung the phone up and went back outside to see if maybe it had disappeared, but it was still there.

I was so screwed up, I decided it was an emissary from the rabbit world and that I had better treat it well. After fetching some celery and carrots out of the refrigerator, I approached it. It just sat there, staring at me. “Hi,” I said and leaned down, holding out the longest celery stalk. It took a slow, lumbering hop toward me, and I jumped back, shaking.

The way I skipped and ran around the yard that afternoon, trying to feed it and avoid it at the same time, you would have thought it was a rabid badger. Slowly, I grew accustomed to it and let it come over to me. I petted it and spoke to it and it rubbed itself like a dog against my leg. When I held it, I could tell it had not come on a mission of malice. I decided that it had come to make peace with me. I asked it, “Why?” but it just sat there, fat and inscrutable. It scarfed down all the vegetables I had in the fridge.

About an hour before Lynn was due home from work, a kid came walking down the alley. He saw me holding the rabbit, petting it, and said, “Ziggy, what are you doing there?” Apparently, Ziggy was a Belgian long haired rabbit that had escaped from its hutch up the alley two days earlier. The kid thanked me for feeding it and took it home to its owner.

We sat in front of the doctor and she explained Lynn’s genetic translocation. She was young and beautiful with long blonde hair, but she had these wrinkled hands that looked like the hands of an old man. It was as if she, herself, was some kind of mutant. I tried not to stare at them as she told us how a piece of the number twelve gene had switched places with a piece of the number two gene. She had diagrams and actual photographs of Lynn’s genes. I didn’t fully grasp her explanation, but what it came down to was that about forty percent of pregnancies would self-abort because of the anomaly. “Your genetics makes you special,” she said to Lynn with a smile. “I realize all you have been through, but I have to tell you that it is more than possible that you can conceive.” “But why does it happen?” I asked. She reached over and put one of those old hands on my shoulder. “There�s no answer,” she said. “It just happens.”

The rabbits had no hold on me after that. We eventually had a baby, a boy with remarkable, almond shaped eyes and skin as smooth as an eggshell. It still took us years to get the loss out of our systems, but eventually it worked itself to the surface like the imbedded shrapnel of a grenade. Now, plunged in the years again, I do not have much time to think about those children we lost, but occasionally, late at night, when the wind is blowing, the house is sleeping, and I am standing in the backdoor, smoking a last cigarette, I search the shadows for them. Minutes later, I come awake, my arms wrapped around myself, staring at the moon.

“Rabbit Test” originally appeared in somewhat altered form in New Myths, 1995, II:2/III:1.

Jeffrey Ford is the author of five novels, the most recent being The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque, and his shorter fiction has garnered wide critical acclaim as well as several awards (his novelette “The Empire of Ice Cream” is currently nominated for a World Fantasy and a Hugo). A new novel, The Shadow Year, and a short story collection are in the works.