Dead Rabbit

Today as we were beginning our usual three-mile run I was first to get to the top of the hill. I looked down and saw R staring at an object on the sidewalk. I imagined it was a bit of clothing, jacket or sweater someone accidentally dropped. R came up and told me it was a dead rabbit. It looked fresh, the skull crushed and blood still coming out. We decided to deal with it later. It was lying in front of the house next door, a duplex, a set of young Russians upstairs and a young couple downstairs who had moved in several months ago and began making their own furniture, much to my irritation. I don’t deal well with noise. When we got back the rabbit was still there. R went to the park to feed her two blue jays and I showered and dressed. We proceeded with our usual routine of having dinner and watching a series on Netflix, this time season three of The Sinner, with Bill Pullman. The main suspect in a car accident whose details arouse deepening suspicions in Pullman’s gray-bearded, world-weary detective Harry Ambrose is experiencing difficulties of a complex & mysterious nature. His beautiful wife is pregnant and he complains of feeling numb. He can’t find his feelings. This appears to have been the reason he got in touch with his old friend from 18 years ago with whom, it appears, he shared an intense friendship based on a mutual obsession with twisted Nietzschean principles & death mania & the imp of the perverse. We pause the show and I do the dishes. R decides to go remove the rabbit from the sidewalk. She gets a pair of surgical gloves for the both of us and two plastic kitchen trash bags and we don our masks and go down to get the rabbit. I wonder how, if it got hit by a car, and was killed instantly, did it end up on the sidewalk? It wouldn’t have been able to crawl there. Did something hit it on the sidewalk? A bicyclist? That seemed very unlikely. The laziest of rabbits would’ve moved. When we got close to the body we could see the eyes were missing and there was a wound in its belly caused by an animal with sharp talons. We guessed a raptor, an eagle or a hawk or an owl. There has been an uptick of raptors in the neighborhood due to habitat loss, a combination of wildfires and insanely aggressive home construction in the Cascade foothills. R wrapped the trash bag around the body and I lifted it. It still felt soft and supple. We put it in the trash, which felt disrespectful, but it’s what the city recommends for dead animals under 15 pounds. One thing did flash through my mind: there are regions in the U.S. that would’ve had no problem making a dinner out of br'er rabbit. I once implied the same scenario to a lady in the suburbs about the local squirrels. She told me it had already begun: squirrel apocalypse.