RABBITS
Juniper had one eye and I knew the moment I walked into the SPCA that she was my rabbit. The side of her face puckered at you; a permanent wink. Her feet hurt, and when I tried to put her in a cage she lost her mind on the tiny metal bars, chomping at them with her aging teeth. We laughed. How funny she was, overreacting. Thumping. Making noise.
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Juniper left behind her toys, her rug, and her water bowl for Atticus. He can’t know her—barely knows me—but his head dips down for hay in a similar dance. Since coming home, he has never seen the inside of a cage.
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My brother punched through the bottom of the curio cabinet in my parents’ living room when he was eight. When I was seventeen, I got so mad I threw a mini-baseball bat, and it skipped end over end across the living room and planted itself in the wall. When my parents got a new chair, we promptly sank a fishing hook in it while practicing how to cast.
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Atticus is an adventurer. They found him abandoned a few months after Easter. He’d managed to survive on his own. There’s a notch on his snout that tells me it wasn’t easy. It’s a gray Tuesday afternoon when I look at him and remember I will live most of my life without him.
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At the café, someone tells me something I’ve already heard: that a memory isn’t you remembering a moment, but remembering the last time you remembered it. A constant watering down and touching up of the few passing now’s you’ve managed to hold on to.
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My dad says, “I don’t remember where most of this stuff came from.” He means the couch he’s sitting on and ornate plates in the curio cabinet. “You kind of collect it all over time without realizing it.”
“The wallpaper in the hallway. That was because of me. I threw that mini bat when we were arguing about something, and it stuck into the wall and you had to fix it.”
My dad says, “I don’t remember that, either.”
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Atticus sleeps on Juniper’s rug. Sometimes I wonder if he knows where it came from.