Rabbit

Most of the time, we are left alone. Every now and then someone fills up the tank of water and gives us some food, but I can’t tell when or how often; I have grown up in a small room without ever seeing the light of day. Sometimes they turn on the lights – a bright, cold shine that made the skin look almost transparent – and that have always been a sign that they once again have begun their horrifying work. Yet I have to admit that the light is also a good sign: maybe our room would be cleaned now, or maybe some food would be added to our grumbling stomachs.

I can hear Them talk outside without understanding what they are saying. Actually, there isn’t much I understand: I have never been taught anything about anything. Only once I have left this room, and that was a long time ago. It was when they moved me from my mother and siblings. Well, not from all of my siblings. Four of them came with me to this new cage and even though we often fight over the food – once I clawed out the eye of one of my sisters and another time I bit one in the arm so badly that they was taken away a few days later – we always end up cuddling in a corner together. My sisters smell of pee and fright, and I know the same smells are clinging to my skin, but they are the only smells of comfort I know. In the beginning in this new room we were searching for Mother, but we soon realized that she was forever gone. She was crying when they took us away. I remember how she fought to keep us, but They just shooed her off and even though she screamed for us, it was obvious that she soon would have new children to look after. Because she is living in a cage with her two brothers, and they always make sure that she is carrying babies. I get sad every time I think about her, but I know that I will never see her again. It might be her they are talking about now; for all I know she can could have been found dead today. It seems to always be someone lying dead somewhere.

I remember how two of my siblings, my only brother and one of my sisters, were found dead in here. They smelled so weird even before they died. The sister was the one I bit, and she was lying shaking and sweating for almost two days until she was finally still. She stressed me with her bad smell and rotting wound; it was so hard to endure her low shrieks of physical suffering every now and them. My brother on the other hand; I never bit him. One day, they took him out of the room and when he was returned he was not the same. He threw up in a corner, but it was not food but blood that came out from between his teeth. We had to live in his smelling pukes of blood for what seemed to be an eternity before he finally stopped. My sisters and I tried to avoid him, but he always followed us because he wanted to share some of our heat. I was actually happy when he finally died.

So now, when the door opens again, the memory of previous openings makes me shiver. Together with my two last living sisters, we huddle against a corner as far from the door we can possibly come. I fear Them, even though this is most likely just another day when they decide to clean up the mess we have made here. We don’t have a bed or a bathroom, nor an area for food, so we eat, sleep and “do our needs” on the floor in this little square area where we live. Hopefully, They would now let us out into that small, smelling cage outside so that they could spray our stinking home with that acid water. Even though it hurt to breathe the air in the room after the cleaning, and even though the food in the bottom of the pile would taste strange and that it will sting in the nose and head to feel the smells, it is better than the strong odours from the body’s waste. Hopefully they are just going to clean. Hopefully.

They are coming in and force us to leave the safety of the corner. One of my sisters tries to run away, but They grab her dirty tangle for hair and pull her with them out to the cage waiting. The two of us left are almost too scared to move, but in the end we manage to force our feet to obey. I release a sigh of relief – they are just going to clean – when one of them grabs me. I scream and try to fight back – tries to make myself free – but they are strong and I can see how only one of my sisters gets to be pushed into the safety of the cage. I tried to call for her, but they are already carrying me away. I am so powerless and so weak; against Them I am nothing, so I accept the defeat and stop my struggle to get away. In the end I am just hanging limp in their grip while silent tears are rolling down my face.

I have no idea where we are going, but we are not going far. They toss me down and push me into a white, cold room. I struggle to get back on my feet, but my legs fail me and when I fall down I can feel how my bladder gives up whatever it had left. When I’m sitting there at the floor with a pounding heart, searching for an explanation, water suddenly pours down over me from above. It is cold and hard and I scream of agony and terror; I’ve never imagined anything so frightening before. Now I really try to escape; I try to run away but there is a white, cold wall wherever I turn. I cry and scream and shiver, but there is no way out. When I am soaked to the bones, the water is turned off and the room fills with hot air. By now, I am sweating and my heart is pounding so hard that all I’m able to do is to lie down on the floor. After an eternity, the hot air stops and a door opens.

They are brining me with them into a bright room filled with object in cold, blank steel. Why is everything here so cold? I wonder while they force me up on a bed made out of metal and more metal. It smells of that strange detergent they use in the rooms, but it also smell of blood. The people around me are all dressed in white coats, with hands that smell and feel weird. They all look so different from me and from my siblings; all of them look so much cleaner. Their eyes are calm and their teeth are shiny. One of them are drinking something from a brown container, while another are taking a bite from something round and red that smells wonderful. They are talking with each other – they are laughing – but I can’t tell what it is that are making them so happy. Maybe this is how I will end up now when I’m clean and taken away from the room. Maybe this is when everything changes for me. They forces me to lie down on the hard bed, but it is when they fasten my body with long, hard reins that I know something is really wrong.

When my head is securely tightened they get down to it. I can’t move, not a millimetre, so I can barely see what is going on around me. The men and women in white coats are moving around me; in and out of my vision. Actually my vision is pretty limited as it is with the bright, white lights in the ceiling. A person grabs my face and while one of her hands forces my eyelids apart, the other one is moving an object towards it. I have never seen anything like it, but it seems to be a thin cylinder in glass filled by a transparent liquid. I don’t dare to even try to close my eyes, and I can see how the drop is slowly being pressed out of the cylinder. I can see when it falls down towards my eye and I can feel the unbearable agony when it hits the vet, glasslike surface. I blink hard and fast, my eye is screaming in pain and so is my also my mouth. My face is burning, my head is pounding and my eye can’t see anything but the reddish blackness behind my eyelid. Then the woman forces my eye to open, but I can feel how it desperately tries to roll back into my head. More drops are coming down, but I can’t see them anymore. My screams seems to pass without anybody’s notice, because nobody so much as turn towards me. Nobody helps me. Nobody comforts me. Nobody saves me.

She lets go of my eye, and I can finally close it in a desperate attempt to blink the stinging, burning pain away. I should know that it is meaningless, but I still try. I can feel how the tears are rolling down my face and into my ears, and I have screamed so much that I no longer have any air left in my lungs. The world is spinning, but the people in white coats don’t stop with their horrible work. I can feel – but not see – how they peel of skin from my arm. It stings; it burn; it makes me scream out anew with a voice that is already hoarse. The air itself seems to be burning me where it touches my bare flesh and the blood is warm when it flows down my skin and drops on the floor. Without skin even my own body gets cold. Then again, the pain is indescribable when they cut loose the fragment of skin they just removed from its rightful place. When I think it can’t hurt any more, I realize that I am wrong. Into the open wound – into me – they add something that makes it hurt even more. My whole body shivers and the time seems to be frozen, but when they start to peel of the skin from my other arm my body and mind surrenders.

It can be days that passes, or years, because I know no more than the torment that fills my body. It doesn’t seem to matter, because all I wish is for this all to end. My life is turned into a deep, dark hole of pain that removes all that I ever was or ever could have been. There is nothing left of me, nothing at all, and I know that nothing ever can give me life back. I’m aware of the long, sharp object that is being pushed into my chest. I’m aware of the slightly burning sensation when the substance within it fills my veins. I am even aware when the people in white coats releases me from the straps that are keeping me down.

I can feel how my body is being lift up, and with my only working eye I can see how we move across the room. The air is cold, but my body seems to be colder. My heart is still pounding in my chest, but the pain seems more and more distant.

I can hear how the people in white coats are discussing something again. They all seem to be so happy and so easy at mind. I can hear them, but I can’t understand them.

I can still taste the blood in my mouth, even though it was a long time ago since I screamed. I must have bitten my tongue recently; I can no longer distinguish one pain from another.

I can see the dumpster filled with bodies; it is standing just outside a door painted in a light, cold, green colour.

I can smell Death when they throw me among the other corpses.