Oryctolagus Cuniculus

Today I made a pear and frangipane tart. I've just taken it out of the oven; it looks delicious. I peeled the pears with a knife, the way my mother has always peeled apples for crumble. I used to look up at her and wonder how she wasn't slicing her thumb. Now that the knife is in my own hands, I marvel that I ever wondered. When I'd finished peeling them, I took the chopping board over to a green bucket in the corner to scrape the green peelings in. Suddenly I was struck with heavy sadness, a phantom punch to the diaphragm. It felt a shame, a crying shame, to pour those peelings away into the compost. Such a waste...

I was thinking, you see, of our old rabbits. We would always save them vegetable scraps to eat, and now I felt that same pang of sadness every time I have to throw them away instead. Carrot peelings, potato skins, the tops of green beans and the bottoms of lettuces. I remember slipping my feet into my father's huge shoes to trudge out into the rainy back garden, a colander of leftover vegetables in my hands. I remember the scrambling sounds of rabbit claws against their wooden floor. The way they'd stand on their hind legs and clutch the wire mesh with their front paws in anticipation. Ears swivelling to hear my approach. When I poured my offering into their bowl they'd set to eating as though it was the first and last meal of their short lives; the best thing they'd ever tasted. Such simple pleasure.

I was given my first rabbit was when I was eight years old, after years of begging for puppies and kittens (my mother hated the former and my father detested the latter). She was grey, with a white belly, a black face, and a wild temperament. She bit me and scratched my feet; I loved her with my whole heart. She was the first of many, generations of mothers and wriggling pink litters under nests of down and straw. A dynasty of rabbits. The family tree is carved into my mind - a motley blur of soft fur and long ears and twitching noses. I can name every last one. I map my memories out using them as guides. They were better, to me, than any dog or cat. We'd coerce them into jumping hurdles, 'fetching' carrots, swimming in the pond. We'd stroke them into hypnosis. On their birthdays, I'd make them special rabbit cakes by layering grass and hay and rabbit food in their bowls and making candles out of carrot sticks.

Once, at a time when we had a mother rabbit and three of her daughters, they took it in turns digging an escape tunnel. By the time we found it, it was longer than the broom handle we stuck down into it. I remember the way they brought up rocks to the surface in their teeth.

I remember them dying, one by one. Naturally, or by those necessary needles held between gloved fingers, killing kindly. I held their limp bodies in my arms or stood outside vet's doors, sobbing.

Now their old hutch lies empty at the bottom of our garden. The rabbits are gone, but they appear to me in recurring dreams, over and over. Rabbits in plagues and hoards, all shapes and sizes and colours, running around me in their thousands. They have burrowed into the recesses of my soul; my heart is a warren full of rabbits.