The Bunny Pool

Flash Fiction

How did I end up in a swimming pool full of bunny rabbits? Simple. I was pushed from a helicopter right into the furry thick of it. Next thing you know, I exploded into them. Imagine a kid diving into one of those corrals full of multicolored plastic balls at a party. Now, instead of a corral, imagine your standard nine-lane, Olympic-sized pool, and instead of a kid hopping into a cage full of balls, imagine me falling sixty feet from the sky into a pool of bunnies. They were so busy with their own predicament that they never saw the massive mammal falling from the sky. They didn’t have time to ask, “Hey, is that a fucking…”

Who knows how many died on impact? Bones cracked, body parts were repositioned, and blood started to flow. And now I’m here, in the center of the pool. I push with my legs and arms toward the surface, but the density of rabbits is unpredictable: piled up in such numbers, they shift and give way without warning. If I’m lucky, one foot finds a solid stack of bunnies, and I kick with the other as if searching, in the darkness, for that last flight of steps that will let me draw a fuller breath. But I sink some more. Naturally, these bunny rabbits are trying to improve their standard of living. I get it. We all are, I suppose. But this is some fucking disorganized gathering of bunny rabbits.

All they do at this stage is claw frantically with their four legs. And that’s no healthy kind of system. Patches of fur and skin glue themselves to my face. There are slimy strings of intestines floating around. A gloppy, brown organ ends up in my mouth. Many of them have lost their eyes, and the ones that can feel the pool quietly filling with blood begin to settle toward the bottom. The rim of the pool is still too far away, and the bunny rabbits sinking their teeth into my flesh are tiring me out. Although I pretend to stroke like an Olympic gold medalist, with style, like a civilized being, I have lost all feeling in my legs. I cough up a ball of red, wet fur, and what I can tell you, if you allow me to sum up the experience, is this: a) it is very hard to swim in a pool full of bunny rabbits, and b) every time I go to work, this is exactly how I feel.

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