The Bluestone Review Spring 2022

AWild Bunny By Deanna Bradberry A wild bunny sucks air, pink lips, slightly puckered, a tiny o. Someone laid him in a corner of a refrigerator box that was cut in half, jagged edges left, as if that person were in a hurry. No rabbit mother there to provide teat. The kitchen is in the Route 52 house; some of my family said “root” some, “rowt.” I was seven years old. A shellacked pine box, wearing inlaid letters, “BILLS,” the size of a number 11 clasp envelope, hangs near an avocado green stove and matching refrigerator - Frigidaire. Envelopes protrude from the top, torn open, Appalachian Power Company, the Town of Wytheville, Leggetts’ department store, a grocery store insert from the Southwest Virginia Enterprise- Mick-or Mack-where Mom and Granny exchange green stamps. Milk -70 cents a gallon. I have ½ of a Pepsi in a green glass bottle, the kind you could re turn to Yonce’s Service Center for one nickel. It is so sweet. Comforting. Cold sweat beads drip down its center. Nervously sipping, I am cautious. My brother is allowed the other half. I think he always took a little more, if he drank first. Mom is on the beige rotary dial phone; she nervously twists the long cord that my dad installed so she could walk between the hallway and kitchen comfortably and see the downstairs den where we played. My brother and I. Mom softly walked back and forth on the shag-mossed green carpet. Mom is beautiful, not too thin, size 14. Her hair is “frost ed” with white tips running from the base of her natural brown scalp. I stare at her often. I do not look like her at all. Her eyes are worried and warm brown, mine bright blue and curious. My hair is stringy and dirty blonde, my teeth gapped; hers are perfect and bright white. I tug at the selvage of her shirt. She swats at me. “Where is his mother,” I ask, interrupting. “Were there sister and brother bunnies?” My brother, two years older, laughs at me, announces that they were all killed by the neighbor’s tractor. I shudder at the image. Mom talks to my best friend’s mother. “Who would rescue the baby bunny?” I continue. My friend’s mother thought that she could. She had a rescued groundhog living in their home, stretching his cocoa fur onto the window seat basking in morning suns, I recall. I hoped the bun ny’s sucking could be made real at her house with a medicine dropper filled with baby formula and ground oatmeal.

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