The Hutch and the Nightmare

One summer when I was of a very young age - an age when memories of our youth first start to penetrate our consciousness - my parents bought for me a Florida White. The Florida White is a breed of rabbit with all white fur and pink round eyes in a round head. My father even built a wood-framed hutch enclosed by chicken wire just for this rabbit. I had not even asked for a pet rabbit - or at least I don't remember asking. The hutch was an even greater surprise. Such things are unexpected at a very early age.

I remember handling the rabbit and it seemed bigger than a rabbit should. Perhaps the pet rabbit was too big for me. As rabbits will sometimes, it resisted my clumsy attempt to pick it up. I cannot remember what gender it even was. It struggled violently against my caresses and - it fell out of my arms onto the pavement below where the hutch had been erected. I remember the rabbit landing on its oh-so-round now flattened head.

The next morning I went out to the hutch to check on my rabbit. I remember seeing its round, unblinking eyes. I tried to stir the animal, but it wouldn't move. My rabbit was dead. I remember reacting to this first death with terrific passion. My parents found the whole thing quite funny. Unmoved by my loss, the rabbit was never replaced and the hutch torn down and forgotten - until now.

That night I had had a dream about the hutch. I was walking towards the little hutch, while it grew to match my physical-dream proportions - as things sometimes do in dreams. I looked around for my rabbit, but could not see him. I turned to look at the wall in front of me and saw a wild rabbit. The rabbit was dead and hanging from a peg by its hind legs. Its eyes were wide open and unblinking. I continued looking at the dead rabbit. Slowly, the rabbit began to twitch gently - even though it was quite dead. The twitching motions eventually became full-blown jerking movements. The dead rabbit's jerking became so violent that it shoots itself off of its death peg. As it landed on the floor of the hutch, it shook with a sickening ersatz vitality that would not stop. Other rabbits, all of them dead, began falling to the floor of the hutch and were all jerking back and forth and up and down with the same wrenching vitality.

I put my hand over my mouth, to choke back the vomit that was fighting its way up from deep below in me. The rabbits continued to fall to floor without cessation. Eventually, the bodies grew to such a pile that they began spilling out of the hutch's door. Backing away from the still moving, still growing pile of bodies it continued to swell and expand. Night fell, with a reddish afterglow in the sky, and the mountain of dead fur and flesh grew and grew and grew.


The mountain eventually grew to cover the ground around me and obscured almost all of my view. The rabbit corpses tumbled and tumbled until they formed a twisting, whirling furred maelstrom. The maelstrom continued swirling and growing as it swallowed whole trees, bushes, fields, animals, birds, houses - sweeping away everything in sight.

I backed up and back into my house and to my bedroom window and continued to watch - still choking - this tremendous, filthy engine of the macabre. And after it had consumed everything in sight, it started belching out its half-digested, grisly meal. At first, it came out as a white, mucosal fluid. Then followed by a rancid, brown catarrh. Then a black, thick pitchlike tar began to emit and cover everything. The tar became a spewing ichor. I awoke when it and the rabbits began spilling into my bedroom window.

I jumped out of my bed in a start and flew directly into my parent's bedroom. I fell upon my mother sobbing incoherently and uncontrollably. My mother awoke and tried to ask what the hell was going on, but seeing my state she tried to console and comfort me. I sobbed in her arms until the dawn. My father looked on dispassionately with a bemused look on his face. I later overheard him comment to my mother about all the fuss over a g******d animal.