I want to take the ears off, but I can't.
(The following is an excerpt from my novel "The Lawnmower," now available on Amazon.)
Our story begins with our hapless hero—an adequate man teetering on the edge of an existential crisis—mowing the lawn... bravely! He zones out, lost in thought, when suddenly he's awoken by a spray of red mist...
It settles brightly on his skin... It tastes of salt and iron...
He realizes, now, he must've driven his lawnmower over a rabbit...
Derek Weaver feels eyes on him from all around, as if the neighbors are watching and know of his crimes. He looks around but nobody stands behind the fences and the hedgerow; none of his neighbors see him or know what he’s done. Perhaps, he thinks, that is the sensation that guilt manifests itself into. The human mind is a powerful moralizer, and it shames well.
There’s hesitance in his mowing, as the machine still revs but he stands still, unsure of whether to proceed. But there is no body, so there is no crime, so there is no guilt—right? The meteorologist said there will be rain on Thursday, though he could be wrong. The sprinklers will take care of washing away the blood, if need be. Yes, the sprinklers. Bone fragments for the birds, if birds need bones. Do birds need bones? What if the dog eats the bones? Will they gum up his digestive tract? Will it cost thousands of dollars to unclog his bowels? Or were the bones pulverized by the mower’s blades? Mustn’t tell his wife, or his children. The bunny was just a sacrifice to the Gods of Summer; benevolent gods who bring warmth and relief from seasonal depression. They require blood sacrifice for a good autumn harvest. We will yield copious amounts of cucumbers and radishes and bell peppers from Eileen’s garden — but since it’s Derek who fertilizes the soil and plants the seeds and plucks the weeds and rations the watering and picks the ripened produce, then isn’t it his garden? He should start calling it his garden, and his patio, and his lawn, and oh, he’s mowing the lawn again. He must’ve returned to autopilot.
When Derek is done, he goes upstairs and showers. Entering the kitchen thirty minutes later, he finds to his surprise that Eileen has made dinner. Sure, it’s Kraft mac and cheese with tuna and peas, but it’s something — and that means he doesn’t have to cook. Wonderful. She deserves a kiss on the cheek for that, which he thinks of all throughout dinner but never commits to.
After the kids have gone to bed, Derek sits in his armchair in the den, in front of his 48” wall-mounted Samsung LCD television. One of those subscription movie channels is playing 1993’s brilliant Tombstone, and Derek is absorbed in it. But the film runs on the longer side, and it’s been a long and tiring day, and his eyes are heavy, and they shut without his permission, only for him to flick them back open again — but each shutting takes more time and more effort to undo, until he’s brought into an attentive state of alert by the sudden banging of a gavel.
Looking ahead of himself, Derek sees that he’s in a courtroom, and he’s sitting behind a table, and the judge’s stately pulpit emerges from the ground ahead of him, made from the same waxed oak wood as the flooring. The timber pews behind him groan and creak as their occupants shift and settle. The judge leans forward and Derek’s vision clarifies, dissolving the fog of weary disorientation and onset glaucoma, and he can plainly make out—with absolute certainty—that the judge is a rabbit.
The judge is a large, anthropomorphic rabbit, in a black robe and a white powdered wig, with dark brown fur and grey whiskers sprouting from a pink nose, and with a dare-he-say-‘cute’ bulging upper lip of matted white fur. Past his aged snout rests two sagging beady eyes, the size of bay leaves. The rabbit’s paw sets down the gavel.
“Order, please. Court is in session,” the judge says, to Derek’s dazed astonishment.
Is this real? It’s hard to tell when you’re half-asleep. Are you still here, or are you there? Where is there? You never know. He never knows. Maybe this is a stress dream. Derek typically has nightmares or anxiety episodes that weaken his emotional facilities for the following day. Maybe it’s another of those, but with rabbits instead of irrational extended family members.
Derek’s defense attorney leans over to him and says, hushed, “Judge Wynn has a soft spot for humans. He’s real empathetic. So don’t worry, you’ll get off easy; if it ain’t clean, it’ll at least be reduced to involuntary manslaughter.” He’s wearing a sharp powder blue suit and brown ovaloid glasses, and he speaks in normal, perfect English with a Mid-Atlantic accent. He’s also a rabbit.
Motioning to the prosecution, his court-appointed DA continues, whispering, “They’ll try to argue you had a grievance, and we’re going to deny. You’ll say it was an amicable relationship and it was accidental. It was just manslaughter; we’re going to try for just manslaughter, at the most. Try to get you off clean, but no promises.”
Derek nods as if he understands, but he’s quite disoriented. His mind is operating on a hundredth of its processing power, and he’s only now coming to the realization that this is a trial, let alone one in which he is the defendant. He realizes, too, that the prosecutors are rabbits, wearing grey suits and unpacking briefcases. And the bailiff is a dark brown rabbit in a sheriff’s uniform. And the stenographer is a rabbit with cat-eye glasses and curly red hair, and she waits to type something out, and she looks at him, and he briefly thinks he’d like to smell her hair.
Derek recognizes the impurity of his thought and looks to the opposite side of the courtroom, at the twelve jurors, who are all rabbits. They appear to be bored. Behind him, the pews are of filled with rabbits of all different colors and ethnicities and fashion trends and temperaments, and they all appear human-like except for the fact that they are anatomically rabbits.
His DA can sense his anxiety and puts an arm around him. “Don’t be nervous. Everything will be okay. Just be yourself. Answer any questions honestly. Don’t make a big deal out of any one question, but don’t let them push you around,” and all the while, Derek is distracted by the rabbit’s massive paw that rests on his shoulder.
Derek looks to the DA’s white furry face with its peach-colored splotches, and the DA smiles and repeats that it’ll be okay, and Derek just thinks his breath smells like radishes.
Judge Wynn raises a paw and gestures, speaking to the prosecution…
“Martin Sloan, as lead prosecutor, you may begin presenting your case.”
The rabbit with the darkest grey suit slicks his tan ears back, only for them to rebound and stick upward. He walks around to the front of the table while steepling his somewhat-elongated paw pads together; his humanistic fingers, still round and together but oddly dexterous.
“This man here,” the rabbit Sloan points to Derek, “this man—Derek Weaver—had held a grievance against his landlord for many years, regarding the caretaking of the lawn, the tending of the garden, and the ownership of the land. Then—yesterday, in fact—he could take it no longer; and in a fit of rage, he viciously chopped up his landlord—Mr. Eugene Hecate—with the blades of a lawnmower.” The crowd in the pews gasps with grotesque bewilderment.
"I wonder what will happen next!" you exclaim, belligerent.
Woah, there! I'll have you know, the only way to find out why anthropomorphic rabbits are holding court—and I promise you, there's more to it than that—is by purchasing "The Lawnmower" on Amazon, in either a Kindle or paperback format. (An audiobook version will become available shortly.)
And, here's a little extra:
“I’m not a bad person, though, am I?”
“You’re a great person, Mare.”
“Derek, that’s not what I’m asking.”
“No,” he assures her, “you are not a bad person.”
Okay, that's enough freebies. Buy the damn novel.