The rabbits were not pets, Dad said. But they had names: Flopsy and Mopsy and Benjamin and Peter. We had Flopsy and Peter for Thanksgiving, that first lean year after we came down the mountain and settled in Lynchburg. Dad pulled them out one at a time while I loitered around their backyard hutches, aware of something imminent. Flopsy and Peter’s eyes swiveled between us. Dad said I should go inside; that he preferred to do this part alone. Even then, this uncharacteristic display of delicacy from him surprised me. I went in through the screen door and crossed the hall to Cal’s room, where I could look out the window into the yard. I arrived at the sill just as Peter’s neck opened and poured. 

We made stew. We mourned the mountain. Cal and I went to school without having to walk the mile and a half down to the dirt road bus stop on Coffeytown Road. Now Dad drove us when he had a car—usually one he had recently repossessed from someone else. When occasionally forced to confront the ethics of his profession, he had a go-to response: he did what he had to to get by. He did it for us. It was, he said, a question of survival, of baseline sustenance. Sometimes he drove the car for a while before turning it over to the bank, if they were particularly sporty or comfortable. He enjoyed a manual transmission. Enjoyed revving at every stoplight with his foot on the clutch, and then the violent but measured hop forward once the light turned. The health of someone else’s transmission did not warrant his consideration. 

He was mobile but he kept his own schedule. Often we waited around outside the front of the school until the sun dipped and we gave up on his appearance and began the walk home, through the long grass on the side of the road, the heat radiating from the buzzing green fields. Cell towers along the ridges flashed red and green as night pulled itself down to us. It was a spring evening when it happened—when we turned the corner onto our street and saw the chaos. Dad had not come for us; we’d had to walk home and I’d berated Cal for wearing flip flops to school, for being unprepared for this possibility. We heard the dog barking a few blocks off. Then the shouting of our neighbor Dawn, and a honking car horn. In the street: a rabbit hutch.

Dawn’s Rottweiler had escaped his fence and plundered our yard, been driven to desperation by the sight of the supple rabbits just out of reach. Teeth sunk into the chicken wire, he pulled a hutch from the backyard and out into the street, dragging it a block down the road, waiting for the plywood to give, for sheet metal to buckle. Traffic stopped as the Rottweiler gnawed at the joints of the structure, snapped at the rabbit huddling just out of reach. Benjamin, mottled brown coat rippling with his rapid breaths. There was blood on the wire where the dog had chewed until he bled—the strength of his want. Benjamin was unharmed. We carried the hutch home between us and in the yard we closed the gate and released him to peruse the grass and to confer with Mopsy, who I thought might be surprised by his reappearance. Who I thought might treat him like a dead thing returned. She didn’t look at him.

The sun went down and Benjamin showed no interest in returning to his battered coop. We let him follow us inside, where he chose a corner of the living room to screw himself into and watch us move around with wide, unblinking eyes. Dad came home, eventually, after we’d gone to bed. I heard him shuffling around downstairs—shapeless noise, the kind of disembodied sounds reported by those who live with ghosts. 

Benjamin never slept well again. He didn’t want to return to the yard, to his hutch. He was skittish, quick to disappear under furniture, around corners. We turned Mopsy into stew and moved Benjamin into her undamaged home. Through the back windows I could see him watching us, feel the yearning pull of his gaze. He had seen what happened to Mopsy and yet still he seemed to expect us to stand between him and the scattering force of the world. He thought we had saved him. 

We moved again, east toward the Chesapeake. Dad disappeared for a while and I cooked what I could forage until the money ran out and in the courtyard of our new apartment building Benjamin watched me from his hutch. I had a hunting knife that I sharpened until I could cut a sheet of printer paper that Cal dangled by one corner. 

We had to do it in the courtyard. There would be no way for Benjamin not to see me coming. The knife too big to conceal, the edge undeniable. He would feel a sense of déjà vu, I knew. Fate deferred. Some new desperate creature approaching, but the ending always the same.