Dead Bunny Down

Photo by Tatsuya sawanobori on Unsplash

There is a dead bunny in the emergency room.

He/she/it is lying there, ears flopped over, tongue out, (I thought that only happened in movies), and back haunches spread-eagled in front of the only empty chair in the room.

Someone has to notice it. It’s right there, where I would be sitting, if it wasn’t lying there, dead.

A little girl with pigtails plays with her ipad, ignoring the bunny. Didn’t she see it? Doesn’t anyone see it?

“Excuse me,” I say to the uniformed man at the security podium outside the entrance to the emergency room waiting area. “Are you aware of the dead bunny on the floor of the emergency room?”

He looks up from his romance novel and over his reading glasses to look past me, but of course, he can’t see the waiting room from where he is, so he pushes he glasses back up his nose and snaps his head back down, as if it suddenly broke from the neck and bounced off his chin.

“There is a dead animal on the floor of the emergency room waiting room.” I repeat it slowly, thinking his hearing is set to the wrong speed, like an old record player, with its dial on thirty-three and a third instead of forty-five.

“Someone will take care of it, I’m sure,” he says, without looking up.

“Someone? Who? Are we waiting for a vet?”

A young woman in a wheelchair arrives, holding a large bag of plush animals. A young man, probably her husband, soon to be a poppa, is pushing her past the guard who waves them on without looking at them. He must have extra sensory something or other. It’s the hearing that is faulty.

I walk back, holding my bandaged hand, dripping blood, now, because I waited so long after slicing it to come here. The guard notices me, somehow and says, “You need to keep that blood from going all over. You could infect someone.”

“What?”

I heard him, I just couldn’t believe him. I could bleed to death like that poor bunny.

I reenter the room to see the woman in the wheelchair waiting beside the chair with the dead bunny between its legs. Does she not see it?

“Miss, or Mrs., I don’t think you want to park your vehicle there.”

She looks at me like I have killed her bunny.

“Excuse me?” she says, not meaning it.

I’m going crazy. That’s it. That has to be it. This is like Jimmy Stewart and his Pookah, Harvey. The bunny isn’t really there. That has to be it. I am hallucinating, like Chat GPT. Don’t worry, sir, that is not a real bunny, dead on the floor, starting to ooze liquid near that woman’s shoes. It isn’t real.

I remember to hold my sliced hand up. Someone once told me that’s what you do when you are bleeding profusely. You hold the bloody part in the air and let gravity keep you from bleeding to death. Does that work? No. Blood trickles down my sleeveto my elbow, which is now bent to allow the blood to pool.

“Sir,” a female voice calls for me to come to her. I can tell because she isn’t saying anything, but is holding a clipboard and a pen, looking angry.

She hands me several unopened packages of large bandages, along with the pen and clipboard and tells me to take a seat, fill it out and bring it back.

There are no seats, except for the one with the dead bunny.

I walk over to the chair. place the clipboard on the seat, tear open the bandages, and place them on the bunny, before sitting down to fill out the paperwork.

“Excuse me, sir, but you cannot do that.” A uniformed man in blue with a matching mask, and a rolling bin stares at me. He is leaning on a broom that is attached to a dustbin-type scooper.

“I can’t do what?” I ask, looking up from my clipboard and the paper that now has drops of blood on it where my name is supposed to go.

“I saw you throw that on the floor.” He points to the bandage blanket over the bunny.

“You did, did you?” I stand, dripping blood on the bandages covering the bunny and grab his shovel-broom combo device and scoop up the bunny, bandages and all. I lift the mass to the rim of the rolling garbage bin and give Mr. Bunny a fine burial at sea, only on land, in an emergency room, in a garbage bin.

“Thanks you,” I say, giving the man back his broom-scoop-bin things.

As he turns to walk away, I ask him, “By the way, sir. Did you happen to notice the dead bunny?”

He stops, looks in his bin and then turns to me and smiles.

I go back to my seat, and a young girl is sitting there, doodling on my bloody paper with the pen.

“Thanks,” she says.

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