The Rabbit

This body is mine.
The mind is mine.

There is a passiveness in my heart.
My taste buds accustomed to Nightshade.
My chest, a breeding ground for mycelium.

The mushrooms are selfish;
They send spores through the crevices of my lungs.

There are fish nibbling at my toes.
Prions in my brain.

The predator comes.

I lie helpless in the riverbank.

He eats me.

Soon, he too, is burdened by my body’s poison of the mind.

He contemplates.
He remorses.

He thinks about all the rabbits he’s eaten.
He thinks back to me.

“Was I always this sick?
Did this rabbit make me sick?”
He pleads in desperation.

I giggle in the pit of his stomach.

“I have always been this sick,”
I whispered to myself.

The mist curls into the forest floor,
dampened by rainfall.

The wolf hears the sound of his own predator:
the hunter pacing through the trees.

A gunshot.

BOOM.

The wolf looks down.

Nothing is butchered.

But there is blood.

He runs to the water to peer at his reflection.

A hole in his ear.
A stain.
Mark of imperfection.

He thinks again:

“Have I always been this sick?
Have I always had this hole in my ear?”

Once more, I giggle but I say nothing.

Stalking, he lays low.

One paw in front of the other,
ears stuck out and alert.

Another gunshot.

BOOM.

Faint.
So far out of sight.

The mist keeps travelling downstream,
becoming fog as it accumulates.

The wolf cannot see out for a mile.

The footsteps of the hunter grow closer.

“How can he find me?”
He wails in despair.

The wolf turns around.

The trail of rabbits lies behind him.

He cannot run away from the evidence of my undoing.
He cannot run away from the past.

His fangs pierced his teeth into my flesh
and consumed me.

And now he begs to live in the sky,
because the forest floor is too hard for him.

The worms eat his flesh.

My body is his.

And his body is mine.