Rabbit, Run*

What’s on my mind? Bugs. As in Bunny. Three days ago, when a bunny the size of a softball squeezed into the Fortress, we took swift, decisive action. 

The Fortress is our highly secure back garden. It’s where we keep the “good stuff” - the tender-petaled flowers and delicate shrubs rabbits can’t resist. The tougher, less appealing, but still-pretty plants live in our unfenced front garden.

It was early morning when the bunny busted into the Fortress. We were in our dressing gowns. We didn’t know when or how she got in, but Himself strategized her eviction with the precision of a military general. This was war.

She shot us an insouciant look as she ripped and chewed clumps of the newly seeded grass Himself had nurtured with pride. (Please, God, don’t let this bunny be a “she.” She looks 10 days old, which means she’s probably pregnant with octuplets.)

Grabbing a broom, Himself opened the glass door leading into the garden. As he’d anticipated, the bunny bolted behind the shed. A quick defensive tactic. Not good. 

Himself opened the back gate. He told me to whip off my dressing gown, ordering me to spread it wider than a toreador’s cape as he poked a broom behind the shed.

I don’t have a military mind, but I didn’t like the idea of putting my privates on public display.

“I don’t want to take off my dwessing gown,” I mew-mew-mewled, but Himself insisted. 

“This is our one chance for me to force the enemy through the open gate and out of the garden!” he barked. 

So I did and he did and the bunny did. Which was how a military general and a woman wearing nothing but a bra forced a probably-pregnant and about-to-give-birth bunny from their garden.

Yesterday, a bunny the size of a tennis ball turned up in the Fortress. With a je ne c’est quoi look, it calmly began chewing the newest and most delicate shoots in the back garden. The broom, the military general, and the naked woman prevailed.

This morning, as a bunny the size of a ping pong ball happily feasted inside the Fortress, Himself spied others slipping through a hole newly dug under the fence. 

“Rabbits taking cover in a foxhole!” he said. 

“Yes, suh!” Giving him the one-finger salute, I repeated my role in our defensive maneuver, but this time without (as the old saying goes) so much as a stitch. I have a feeling we’ve won the battle but Bugs will win the war.

The downside is that I’ve been running through the Fortress starkers. The upside is that by the time Spring morphs into Summer, I’m going to have one hell of a tan.

© Nicole Parton, 2019

* With apologies to the late, great John Updike, for swiping the name of his novel.