Ruined Rabbit

My first indication that something was wrong was when my dogs, Sky and Whisky, failed to reappear at the sliding glass door to the backyard. Usually, by the time I pour the coffee, they are standing at the back door, barking at me to let them inside. Instead, I could see them, like two shadows at the back of the yard. They wouldn't come in when I called them and they were clearly agitated about something. Whisky was pacing furiously back and forth with her tail in the air, a sure sign that something was up. I slipped on my shoes and went out to see what they were so excited about. That's when I saw the body of a dead rabbit stuck in one of the diamond shaped holes of the chain linked fence.

It had snowed several inches that weekend. The rabbit, who must have been used to darting underneath the fence whenever he wanted to get out of the yard, had evidently misjudged the height and wedged himself halfway through one of the lower links of the fence. This must have happened early the night before because his dead body was frozen solid. I couldn't pull him out. His powerful muscles, had propelled him over halfway through the fence before his lower half had become stuck. This must have been the most surprising and painful experience of his short life. If I grew vegetables, I would probably have felt that the little fiend got what he deserved. But I do not grow vegetables.

There was only one thing I could do without ruining the fence. I shuffled through the snow until I found the large shovel I use to pick up dog crap. It was very cold outside. I had put my shoes on without any socks and now my bare ankles were covered with snow. I thought about going inside and getting properly dressed, but I just wanted to get it over with and get back to my cup of coffee. The dead rabbit was hard against a bush on the inside of the fence, so I jumped over with my shovel and squared off against his front half. His dead eyes seemed to look in the distance. I took the handle of the shovel in both hands, raised it, and brought the sharp end down on the rabbit's body, as close to the fence as I could. Then I raised the shovel and brought it down again. Then again. As I slowly chopped the rabbit in half, I thought about what I must look like: a thirty-six year old man standing outside in NIU sweatpants and a hoodie, cutting a dead rabbit in half with a shovel and swearing a lot. At least he was good and frozen. When the chopping was done, I shoveled up the two halves and put them in the trash. I felt like somebody ought to say something. I hoped this was not an indication of how my week would go.

When the shooting occurred, on Thursday, I was at home. Someone called to make sure I was ok. Then I turned on the news and the story was in progress. it's odd what goes through your mind at times like that. The first thing that came to mind was my memory of the only time I have ever been in Cole Hall, when I saw some kid run out of the auditorium and puke in the drinking fountain. You don't see something like that every day and I had avoided the building ever since. Being at home, an hour away from campus, there was nothing I could do but stand in front of the television and watch as they wheeled the bodies out to an ambulance which, incidentally, was parked in my usual parking spot. I wondered absurdly if the draconian meter-maid from Campus Parking Services would give the EMT's a ticket for not having a yellow parking sticker.

Later, my students would tell me about the bodies. Mangled bodies being carried away on stretchers. Bodies pressing to get away. Dead bodies. Several students, who were not mine, told of leaping over the bodies of killed and wounded students in order to get away from Stephen Kazmierczak, who was shooting at them from the raised lecture area. I had one student who was enrolled in that class, but who skipped class on that Thursday to attend a funeral.

As I sat around the house, waiting for the University to reopen, I thought about the rabbit. I have never heard of a rabbit getting stuck like that, in a fence. It seemed so improbable. And why did it happen just a few days before the shooting? In my mind, I began to connect the two separate tragedies.I wondered if significant events can somehow reverberate through time. What if these two events, the rabbit and the shooting were connected this way, one of them reverberating off the other through some kind of connection? If that were true, then which event was the primary one, and which the antecedent? Clearly the shooting was worse too me, but maybe that's not how it works with this time-space thing. Maybe the dead rabbit was more important to the universe. There was no way to tell for sure.

The university was closed for a week and a half. I kept in touch with my students with email. I was surprised to learn later that not every teacher did this. Before classes resumed, we had a day of pointless meetings designed to prepare everyone. These meetings were useless, but they are what you do when something like this happens. There were experts. That is to say there were people from Virginia Tech, where the same thing happened a year before, and they weren't much help. They could only tell us that our students may or may not feel a range of emotions and may or may not want to talk about it, which is a little like predicting that the weather will have "times of sun and clouds with a chance of precipitation."

I made my syllabus easier to accommodate any students who might have post traumatic stress disorder. The result of this was that almost my entire class received A's, which is frowned upon by the school. I was told that students are expected to conform to a bell curve, that they can't all do a good job. I thought about this, then gave them A's anyway.

I didn't personally know any of the students who were killed and, since I wasn't there on the day it happened, I find it hard to imagine what it was like. But I often think about that rabbit and that bitter cold morning. As I write this, it is June. The air is humid and soft and the field behind my house is full of wildlife. When I walk my dogs in the morning, we see young rabbits and squirrels in almost every yard. A small grey bird has built a nest outside my office window. Two days ago, her chicks finally hatched and now I spend my mornings, when I should be writing, just watching her feed them. Even when I am hard at work, I can hear the flutter of her wings and know that she is out in the front yard and that she will return with something to eat for them. She must be used to my presence, because she doesn't fly away when I approach. I have walked right up to the nest and peeked in on them from a few inches away. she doesn't get excited at all, but only sits with her chicks and eyes me warily, as if I might be a sign of approaching danger.