Bunnies In a Box

It’s a cardboard box full of nine baby bunnies so tiny I can easily fit three in the palm of my hand. A heat lamp hovers nearby, trying to do what their mother no longer can. They’re lucky the student found them when she did – a high school soccer field is no place for a herd of orphaned rabbits. Their fragile bodies curl into each other like velvet puzzle pieces and as I watch their noses try to navigate the cold world – their eyes have yet to open – I silently mourn their inevitable death.

Minutes before, the science teacher tried feeding them cow’s milk with an eyedropper but their mouths are too small to take it. Nothing – not even an army of people fighting for their survival – can substitute their mother. It’s what I’m thinking as I watch them breathe their quick shallow breaths, nine tender tummies rising and falling in near-perfect unison.

Six hours later I’m still thinking it. The kids are in bed and the television’s humming its usual late night drone and I can’t get the box of bunnies off my mind. I tell my husband and he nods sympathetically, knowing how much I love animals, but this – this aching knot in my chest – is something deeper. I think of their mother, who spent less than a week with her babies before she died – of how she carried them, birthed them, and never got the chance to nurture them – and the injustice of it consumes me.

To her children, she was vitally irreplaceable. I wonder if she knew that.

Savannah peeks out her bedroom door, a tiny face framed by light brown curls. “Can you come lay by me?” she pleads, and I roll my eyes because it’s the third time she’s asked.

Except this time I don’t say no.

This time I follow her back to her room, where she giggles breathlessly as we hop into her toddler bed and burrow deep into the covers. This time instead of turning down an invitation that may not come tomorrow, I curl up next to my daughter, her fragile body tucked safely between my arms.

My soft tiny bunny.

In her little cardboard box.