To be honest, I was tempted to edit heavily; I remember my English teacher when I was a sophomore saying "write in red heat, edit in cold blood." I guess I'm not so cold-blooded, I can't touch a word; every one evokes some memory, a distant sound or a familiar smell.
So as not to appear too much of a softie, I will comment on it instead, maybe even make fun of it a bit. Hey, I'm allowed my pretensions! Comments are in [brackets] and italics.
The Bunny That Could Have Been
One day, when [while, while, while! repeat after me, while!] my third grade classmates and I were playing in the school playground, we found a small rabbit hopping around some low foliage [yes, i read the dictionary for leisure]. It was such a cute thing, with thick brown-black fur, long ears and a puffy, bushy tail, so we decided to adopt it. We named him Bunny [with this one act, proving our inherent lack of creativity]. We agreed to share ownership of the animal and [to] keep him hidden where we found him [hidden, found-- I am a word smith!] because we knew that our parents would never consent to keeping this rabbit as a pet at home. “You found that animal where?” they’d be sure to ask and judging that it probably had rabies or some other nasty things, they’d quickly put it to sleep. That [comma, I believe] and the fact that we had absolutely no idea how to divide a live rabbit equally does this mean we knew how to divide a rabbit, just not equally? Would it had been easier with a dead rabbit? I probably would have gone for a foot].
One of my friends, who lived nearby, rushed to his house and came back with an old bird cage. We placed Bunny in there and hid him (we presumed it was a he, though we never really knew) behind some bushes. Everyday during break time and after school, we would visit Bunny and play with him, giving him our leftover snacks and sandwiches. We became so fond of Bunny that we couldn’t imagine what it would be like without Bunny [at this point one can say that I have not yet realized that pronouns were my friends].
Then one day, while we were feeding Bunny, a man came up to us and said that our Bunny belonged to him and that it got lost a few days ago when its cage was broken. We didn’t believe him, or rather, we didn’t want to return Bunny, so we took the cage and ran off. We hid Bunny in a new place far away from the old one so that the mean and nasty stranger would never find him.
We continued our routine everyday, visiting Bunny and feeding him after school. Then one very ordinary day, we saw Bunny lying still inside the cage. We called to him and shook the cage but he did not stir [out of the whole thing, this is the single word I wanted to edit. Stir? Oh I shall rue the day...]. We tried to make him hop by gently spanking his bottom but still he did not move. Eventually, we accepted the unacceptable fact. Bunny was dead. It would take a few years and a lot of science classes later for us to find out the cause of Bunny’s death: rabbits, as a rule, could not live on junk food alone [now THAT is a gem, even now. The Biblical undertone alone is genius!].
We cried silently and secretly, mourning the loss of someone very special. We buried Bunny in a shallow hole and marked his grave with some stones.
Up until now, I can’t help but wonder. What if we gave Bunny over to that man? Would he have taken better care of Bunny? Would Bunny have lived to become a successful and accomplished rabbit?
I don’t really know and I don’t think that I shall ever find out. [End]
Well, there you have it-- my prepubescent attempt at writing. A lot of style and content has changed since then, though some still remain the same, if you know how to recognize it.
I eat rabbits now, by the way. They make particularly good stew, with potatoes and leeks. Again, some things are still the same. Most of my mourning and crying I still do in secret. I still accept that there are questions that will remain unanswered and that some things will never be explained. I still maintain that sometimes it's better to let something that you love go and lose it, maybe because it's better with someone else or you're holding it back from becoming what it was meant to be.
Sometimes, in a moment of clarity, peering through uncertainty and fear, you realize the best thing is to let go and walk away.
