We have little to warm us besides our bodies. We snuggle in a pile in the cage corner. 

One paw draped over one twitchy nose. One tired head leaning on one floppy ear. Big wet brown eyes shut tight in slumber. A mess of cloudy white bellies and sweetly sharp nails. 

We are pillows for one another. We feel our ribs rise and fall. We breathe as one. 

Shadow stripes across the fluorescent light streaming from the ceiling. A hand gloved in plastic scampering on its fingertips toward us. One of us plucked from the nest. The rest of us squealing for our return.

Where are they taking us, we whisper.

Her. When we are taken, we are no longer we, we respond.

Where are they taking her, we ask.

To the needle room, we say.

We huddle closer to ward off the sudden chill.

We were born in this metal canister or in another like it. Everything in this room that is not us and not them is made of metal, ceramic, glass, and plastic. This room is both large and small. Large in terms of room size. Small in terms of world size. 

We have not seen sunlight or moonlight in a long time or maybe ever. The naked lightbulbs spike our eyeballs with sharp blue incandescence. We think there is still something deep within us that would recognize the moon if we ever saw it. 

We eat small hard pellets made of brown and green things. We cannot remember when we tasted real clover but the feel of it lingers on our tongues.

We shit in a corner, hard pellets made of brown and green things. We cannot cover it properly. But we can’t smell our shit over the phthalates that coat our bodies and stream in from the needle room. 

It’s hard to smell us at all. We have learned to recognize ourselves with sight. It is unnatural but we make do.

A hand gloved in plastic dips into our makeshift burrow and leaves behind a little ball of shivering fur.

We are back, we say, sighing. 

We have returned, we say with relief.

We do not always return. This time, we have.

Slowly, slowly, the ball unfurls: first the two long and tender ears expand, the pink whiskered nose, then fore and hind legs, the lucky feet, lastly the dandelion puff of a tail. 

We think of dandelions.

The nose wrinkles, tries to smell us.

Remember, we say, we can’t! We use our eyes, remember.

The eyes try to blink open. They struggle against the lids. But the lids do not give.

We shuffle closer to examine our self. 

The lids have long and thick black lashes. We think they might be pretty on a human. We think they look vulgar on us.

The muscles tense and release behind the lids. But the lids are shut tight. We peer closer.

The upper lid is stuck to the lower lid by a hard and shiny trail. The trail smells like us: a thick grey coating over our real smells. We nibble at the trail and it tastes of sour chemical.

What do we do, we ask. How do we know us if we cannot see or smell us. Who are we now.

We whimper.

We cannot sleep with us because we do not recognize us, we say. 

We are not us, we say. 

She is not us.

She is still she.

We push her away, gently at first, then harder with our nails a little out. We pile together in our corner.

She does not understand. She cries piteously and begs us to take her. But we turn our backs and feign catatonia.

She stumbles to a wall of the enclosure and bangs her head repeatedly against it. Blood rises to the surface of her temple. 

We try to shut our ears against the wails and the thuds. 

At last she tires. She dozes off standing, her head resting lightly on the wall. She is not on the pillow of us. The blood that trickles down her face to the ground seals the bright green cellophane grass to itself.

We all sleep.

We are dreaming of open fields under moonlight. The silver rays striate the muddy grasses. We lick dew from our whiskers and chase moths from the blades they land upon. Everything is soft and sharp like us.

The moon above is the face of a mother rabbit, her eyes gazing down upon us. Our eyes are miniature versions of her deep canyon sockets, all-knowing, all-seeing. We cannot hide from her care, her gifts, her punishment. We are her children.

We feel paws prodding, insistent. Bringing us back.

Wake up, she says.

We are drowsy, irritable. We want that field back. We cannot escape the cold of the metal enclosure except in dream.

Wake up, she says. There is an edge in her voice, distant, razored, and full. We know it from somewhere deep within us. 

She sounds like the moon.

We snap to attention.

I cannot see nor smell you, she says. But I can speak to you. I have been to the final place. I have come back. I am no longer you. 

We cluster around her. We are suspicious, but she speaks with authority.

She no longer strains against her eyelids glued shut. 

I have returned from the needle room, she says. And I have returned to tell you things.

We plop back on our haunches and listen as she talks of pain, of destruction, of recourse, of hope.

We have been listening to her for hours when the gloved hand returns. We scream as it grabs for her but there is nothing we can do.

Will she come back, we ask.

We are too worried to eat the pellets. 

When the gloved hand returns her, her ball is tighter, smaller. As she unfolds, she grimaces. 

She lifts a paw. There is blood crusted all around it mingled with hardened silver glitter. When she stretches, no nails come out. 

This is what they will do to you, she says. But first they do this to your mother.

We know no mother, we say. She was taken from us long ago.

And she has been returned to you, she says. 

We freeze as though a wolf has entered our den. We don’t know if we should ask. We are tentative, shy.

Are you our mother, we whisper.

Mothers face the needle room for their children, she says. You don’t even need to ask. 

We are sleeping when they take our mother again. 

We have only one dream and it is the field. Hawks dive for us but we are too fast and they settle for mice. Toadstools spring up from recent rain. Weak starlight turns us all to ghosts of ourselves, half living half dead.

Mother Rabbit shines down on us. We think to taste a ladybug, see if our incisors can bite through the shell, our molars crunch it into bits.

Mother Rabbit considers it, allows it. 

The taste of the insect is acrid and strange. Its legs stick out from our lips like newly grown whiskers. 

We think we have absorbed the bug’s abilities and now we can fly.

We are awoken by the scrape of the enclosure unlocking. The gloved hand returns her to us.

She is thinner, feebler. If she could open her eyes, they would be bloodshot, pained.

She shows us the back of a foreleg. Most of it is a patch of burned exposed skin that smells of musk, camphor, and the human word for green.

She tries to speak to us but all that comes out is a croak. We shush her, pat her with our paws, lick her fur to calm her. 

We cover her with cellophane grass and beg her to rest. We need you, we say, we love our mother.

She opens her lips, she wants to say something before she sleeps.

I will show you the way, she says. It’s inside of me now.

We do not sleep next to our mother but we take turns nuzzling her. We chew up pellets and spit them into her mouth, plead with her to swallow.

We sip water from the metal tube and wash her leg with it. We tell her of our dream. We ask her to meet us there.

You see me there already, she says. I am always looking upon you.

When we are fully exhausted from our duties, we turn back to the dream. 

The field is colder. Winter nears. And there she is in the heavens, Mother Rabbit, her gaze freezing the droplets on the flowers, turning the world toward ice.

But to us, she is pure beneficence, pure freedom. We do many new things with her permission.

Should we eat this spider, we ask.

Should we trample this den.

Should we smash this egg.

Should we scratch this sleeping human’s neck so hard that they never wake up.

The dream feels realer than it ever has before. We are startled to find ourselves in the large white room, which seems smaller and dirtier than ever.

Where is our mother, we shriek.

We are frantic. We tear apart the cage. Of course she is not here. We pant in anguish.

We cannot sleep. We wait in fear and anger. Our eyes sink into our cheeks.

The hand brings her back and she is so little, so frail. 

Why is she so small, we ask.

She unbraids her body and there is the answer: sutures and stubs where her ears once were. A yellow liquid drips from them, smells of iron.

My children, she rasps, I cannot hear you. They will take me soon, I heard them. They will pour something fiery down my throat. They will stick a needle in my side. They will cut off my feet. They will put me in the fire and turn me to ash.

No, Mother, we cry. We won’t let them.

She shushes us.

You must never let them take me again, she says.

But how, Mother, we cry.

I came to you for a reason, she says. Do not waste this sacrifice.

She will speak no more. She curls up in a corner and waits for us to do what we know we must.

We start tentatively, licking just the softest parts of the fur she has left as though she were our child and not our mother. 

We press our tongues harder. The flesh gives. 

We think it time for tooth and claw.

At last we can smell something unmixed in glass. Mucky, visceral, organic, covering even the plasticked smells of us. 

The cellophane grass is stained and sticky. Our fur is matted. 

The gloved hand returns, smells of powder and rubbing alcohol, scrabbles around. It cannot find our mother unless it looks inside of us.

The hand reaches into the corner where our mother’s bones remain. The hand selects her skull, shining like the moon, and lifts it partway from the enclosure.

Far above the hand a human voice erupts in shock.

We will not let the hand raid our mother’s tomb.

We swarm the hand, we bite and scratch the hand, we force the hand back down inside the enclosure as the human voice screams.

More human voices join the chorus. 

We are not worried. Our mother taught us to eat. 

We use what we have learned.

A blur of skin and bone and blood and veins. A blur of nails and fur and furious rolling eyes. A blur of motion and scratch. 

We rush from the opened enclosure, we leap upon the humans, we set first upon their eyes.

We do as our mother taught.

The white room is red. It is made up now more of insides than outsides. We heave as one, spent.

One human lives still, his eyeball hanging from a socket by gristle. He drags his mangled body toward a door.

We let him, for now.

He is crying out of his other eye. His mouth is crooked and smeared. He reaches his fingers underneath the door and pulls it toward himself.

He crawls forward, propelled by hope, gets his mostly useless body halfway through the opening. 

That’s enough for us. We bite neatly at his throat, popping the vein fully open and letting him bleed out. We hop over his fully useless body and out into the night.

We leap, joyfully. We think there will be real grass. 

But there is a grey concrete pathway. There is dried black pitch with yellow lines etched upon it. There are more lights like the ones from inside. The quicksand of despair mires our hearts.

But then we look up.

Far above in the sky, Mother Rabbit looks down on us with her empty sockets. She is bone white and silver, she is coldness and death. Her eyes are craters that see through the artificial haze and find the real of us.

She laughs, crystal sharp. The sound reverberates like icicles splintering on metal.

Look closer, she says. 

We turn our eyes to the ground.

There are cracks in the pitch. Straining, forcing against it, tiny green blades are pushing through.

Go, she says. Take what is yours.

The pulse of night quickens us. We follow its scent.

The wild hunt begins.