A student runs toward me as I carry a bowl of lettuce, peppers, and baby carrots to the rabbit hutch. “I want to help!” he yells, zooming to my side. He is four and in the early care program, and I know him because he loves animals just as much as I do. I let him make two small bowls of salad for the rabbits.
I lift the top of the hutch to remove the old food cups, and beneath one is the lifeless body of a newborn bunny. Instinctually, I cover the tiny corpse, bend to accept the child’s salad, and call out to the early care children that they are taking a surprise trip to the playground.
When the room is quiet, I lift the kit carefully with a towel and hold it in my hand. It is still pink. Its eyes are closed. It is all at once life and death. It is impossible to know where one stopped and the other began. The world is airless for a moment. I feel nothing, and then deep sadness that burns through my chest.
Later in the day, I am asked to take the mother bunny to the vet. For five months, we thought both rabbits were male. They are siblings, one white and gray, the other fluffy brown, whom I named Lint Ball and Dust Bunny. I lift Lint Ball from the hutch and place her in the carrier. Her fur is matted with urine. She looks bedraggled. I have called her Hot Mess for several weeks because something always seemed stuck in her hair. I feel a surge of guilt and shame for giving her the nickname. While I had laughed at her dirtiness, her brother had been marking her as his territory.
The vet tells me that Lint Ball is just fine. “Her brother was urinating on her,” she says, “because he was preparing to mate.”
“Keep them in separate cages far apart,” she instructs. “He will attempt to impregnate her through the bars if they are too close – and know that she can be pregnant again two days after birthing a litter.”
For heaven’s sake, I think. No wonder praying mantises and black widows eat the males after intercourse.
“You have a choice,” the vet says as I leave. “You can spay Lint Ball, but it’s $600 and invasive, or you can neuter her brother. That’s $180.”
“Are you really asking me whether this is a decision,” I say, laughing. “I am 100% going to cut the asshole’s balls off.” The entire waiting room laughs.
In the car on the way home, I start to cry.
I drop Lint Ball off at school and ask a colleague to set her up in my classroom, then drive home and work until ten. There are meetings until six, a dinner break, and parent conferences via Zoom.
When I log off of the last call, my brain pixelates. I am irrationally irritated by a five-month-old male bunny who impregnated his sister. I am exhausted. I stand, then sink back into my chair. After a few minutes of silence, I tuck my son into bed, curl around the cat, and tumble into sleep. Somewhere in the night, I dream that I smell like Lint Ball’s urine-crusted fur. I wake covered in sweat.
In the morning, I discover another baby, and it is miraculously alive, snuffling and moving blindly through the hutch where Dust Bunny sits. I gather the tiniest kit I’ve ever seen in a fleece blanket and rush it to my classroom. I place it in the cage, and Lint Ball immediately sits on top of it, her mother instincts in full gear. She licks her baby and spends an hour creating a nest with hay and blankets.
Back at the main hutch, I search and find three more kits. They are curled together beneath a clump of Lint Ball’s fur. None have survived.
We name the tiniest kit Simcha, which means joy in Hebrew. We call it Simi for short, and also Fuzz Ball, although it doesn’t have any fur yet.
I meet with a parent in my classroom, which is a windowless rectangle. After the topics about their child have been discussed, they look around the room and said, “There is so much life in this space. How are so many things alive in a room with no windows?”
“We make our own light,” I say, touching one of the plants growing despite total sun deprivation. “If anything, aliveness is most important in the darkest of spaces.”
“Who are you,” the parent asks with a laugh. I don’t have an answer, but the question rattles me.
I hear Lint Ball shift in her cage. The baby is asleep in the nesting box. I lift mama and place her on a towel on my thighs. Her white fur is covered in crusty brown urine. My irrational anger flares once more. I wash her hair with baby wipes, then take a fine-toothed comb and tease out the effluvium, the knots, the evidence. I do this for over an hour. I brush her slowly until her eyes close, and her body relaxes. Then I lift her to my neck and rest my cheek on her side. She sleeps in the hollow of my collarbone. I close my eyes and breathe. I close my eyes and realize that I am crying.
I’m sorry, I think to myself. I am sorry that your brother did this to you. I am sorry that I didn’t realize it. I am going to make sure that you are safe. We’re going to cut his balls off, and until then, you’re going to stay in this room with me. I won’t let this happen again.
There is a pile of soiled fur on the table. I place Lint Ball back in the cage and gather the remains of her brushing. Pausing at the trash can, I pivot, the lump of evidence cupped in my palms. “Lint Ball,” I whisper. “Don’t pull any more of your fur out for the baby nest. We’re going to use this. We will use the evidence of bad for the good of life.”
I place the fur into the nesting box, tucking it around Simi. Lint Ball sleeps in the corner. The kit snuggles in. I turn off the light, car keys in hand, and head home.
In the evening, I go to therapy, then walk up 6th Avenue to the train. Rain falls in the darkness of December and glitters through the ever-present light of the city. I feel the coolness of the drops on my hands and cheeks and realize I am laughing. Throughout the hour and a half I had dug in my heels around the concepts of anger, of self-care. I don’t feel that, I’d said, and in truth, it felt untouchable, nearly invisible, like white-hot coals at the base of the deep depths of my consciousness.
I am laughing and tearful together as I step into Penn Station. I look like a hot mess, eye makeup smeared, a soggy paper bag breaking in my hands, a head of broccoli poking through the bottom and a bottle of wine wedged under my arm, rabbit fur still stuck to my pants, putting one foot in front of the other, boarding a train to the suburbs, thinking about the lousy brother bunny whose balls need to be cut off and the love and care that I gave the mama. The irony, the synchronicity, the use of the bad for the good of life. Aliveness in the darkest of spaces.
object of memory 
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