I *HATE* Rabbits

I was almost killed by a rabbit once. I hate them. They are evil little creatures.

To this day, when I am walking thru Big Lots, I cannot force myself to walk down the aisle with the Easter Bunny figurines. I was there the other day with Allan. We got to the Easter Bunny aisle. I started to take a step, but before my foot could even touch the floor, I saw the fucking things...lined up and staring at me. "Nope!" I said, as a chill instantly tensed up my shoulder muscles. I spun on my heel and went the other way. I found safety with the garden supplies. Crisis averted.

"Hey Tony!"

"Yes?"

"LOOK!"

There's Allan, holding a goddamned Easter Bunny right in my face. "UHHHH!" was all I could manage.

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My grandmother lived in Eastern Arkansas, where everything is flat, rural, wet and dirty. She owned a few hundred acres of land that was used to grow cotton, then soybeans. As she got old and I guess unwilling or unable to deal with the farmers that leased her land, she divided it up into 7 lots and gave one to each of her surviving children. My dad's plot runs right up alongside (or maybe even partly underneath) a big, nasty, swampy mud hole. I think it's called Hog Tuss Lake (we always called it Hog Wash Lake). The cypress are pretty, but that's the only positive thing I can say about it.

Several years ago, I went there with my Dad and my brother Tim. My Dad wanted to go so he could clear off his father's grave site. My brother and I were going to go hunting. (I wasn't gay yet.) We had Tim's dog Blue, a lovable but ignorant Blue Tick Hound. He really was a beautiful animal, but DUMB!

It must have been Fall, because I remember everything was brown, but it may have just been because everything in Lee County is dirty. Dad started hacking down the weeds, and Tim and I walked off into the woods, following the bank of the big dirty mud hole.

It wasn't long before Blue picked up the scent of something. He ran up to the stump of an old dead cypress tree, and stuck his nose into a cavity of the root ball. He was barking like a motherfucker, and out the other side of the stump loped the BIGGEST fucking rabbit I've ever seen. It was a swamp rabbit! It was almost as big as the dog! (And it was brown, like dirt!)

Tim started screaming, "OH MY GOD! OH MY GOD!", but I was just standing there thinking that's a big fucking rabbit!

I don't know why he didn't just shoot the thing...it was so big it could barely run. But instead, he gives ME the gun and tries to pull Blue away from the tree stump.

At first, it was going away from us, but made a hairpin turn and started right for us.

"SHOOT IT! SHOOT IT!"

It's running, no, jogging toward me. Tim is yelling at me. Blue still has his head buried in the hole in the tree.

I'm panicked.

The giant rabbit is coming right at me. I see it now in slow motion, the PTSD making every gruesome detail even worse than it surely ever was. Its giant brown teeth gnashing, strings of slobber flying as he lurched closer and closer to me. His blood red eyes fixed on me with the intent of disemboweling me.

I closed my eyes and fired one shot from the .22.

It's over.

I missed.

The rabbit lumbered into the woods. Tim, infuriated at the dog by this point, is still screaming at me. He managed to pull Blue away from the stump, but the dog kept going back and barking at the hole.

I didn't know how to clear the chamber to fire the gun again.

As we were walking back to the car, Dad saw us. "Hey! I only heard one shot, you musta got 'im!"

"No! Tony had the gun! He almost shot ME!"

"I'M SORRY!! It was coming RIGHT AT ME!"

I have not been back to Lee County for 25 years.