Rabbit Season

Gemma de Choisy

If you’re looking to kill some time, we should go to the Foxhead. You know the bar I mean. Red trailer, Market Street. Time goes there to die. There’s a cemetery on the wall behind the bar—ever noticed? Eighteen clocks above the liquor bottles. Antiques. All dead. Luther the bartender says they might still work. He says they might just need to be wound. The PBR sign says WHAT’LL YOU HAVE. That’s not the same as WHAT DO YOU WANT, is it? Either way, the clocks are frozen so it’s six o’clock forever on the far-right shelf, while it’s half-past twelve in the center, and outside the window the sun is going down, and I’m so sorry we didn’t love each other better. Do you know what the clocks remind me of now that the night’s gone dark? Look. You can see yourself in their faces, in the glass. They look like those old TVS with bulging screens full of cathode tubes. Remember those? We had one when I was a kid. I watched Looney Tunes on a Laserdisc that always got stuck on the same bum loop. There was Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck and Elmer in between, and RABBIT SEASON! DUCK SEASON! RABBIT SEASON! forever and ever, amen, going on so long that Elmer Fudd got whiplashed and Daffy lisped himself dry, and nobody could ever say FIRE! much less pull the trigger. I know. Like our fights. Always, the contradictions. Always the same. But there was no way to fix it. It had always been that way. No doubt some magnet screwed the track. All we could do was turn it off. Flip the switch. We waited for the flash. Do you remember that? It was a sharp breath in the middle, before it all collapsed to black.