Ghost Bunny on Rainbow Bridge
In NYC circa now, there lived a girl named Anna. She had a rabbit named Ralph, who was black and small and eager. She also had a boyfriend who was also dark haired, small, and eager. The boyfriend’s name was Cameron. He was a tech bro in Silicon Alley. Well, that’s what he said he did at parties. Really, he was a broker for tech stocks, which fine, made him a lot of money, but it was dull.
Anna was small and blonde and fierce. Her hair curled tight and she didn’t smile easy. She ran an artisanal donut shop online where her special addition was honey from the bees cultivated by a neighbor. She was constantly worried about honey production. The donuts wouldn’t be as good without the honey, and there was a lot of competition in the city for the artisanal donut market. Her bunny seemed to like the donuts—at least he licked them and then looked at her with intensity. Cameron, on the other hand, was often distracted by work, and he was a very strict with himself when it came to sugar. Anna wished sometimes that the roles were reversed—intensely interested boyfriend and indifferent and distracted rabbit. At least then she could say that he wasn’t the right pet. She didn’t want to say that maybe he wasn’t quite the right boyfriend.
One day Ralph got ill. Then he got a little better. Then he got very ill, and then he was an ex-bunny. Anna kept his ashes in a small box in her living room, right above his cage. She was too sad to look for a new bunny, too sad to get rid of the cage, and too sad to pay much attention to Cameron. After a while, Cameron started to notice. His laundry wasn’t done. Anna never made roast chicken anymore. She constantly forgot to pick up the coffee he liked at the store, wandering home spaced-out with a single basil plant in tow that no one wanted, which she would then forget to water or use for cooking.
And Cameron wasn’t one to pick up the emotional slack. But Anna was aggravating him, wandering around the apartment not kissing him, absently playing with old Ralph fluffs and plopping heavily onto the couch. He couldn’t watch any more Netflix nature specials with her—something had to be done. He went online and found a local pet grief therapy group and which he insisted Anna attend. “Honey,” he said/demanded, “you are going to 8th Street’s Pet Parents in Mourning on Tuesday.” And she did, she went.
The PPM website where Anna booked her one-on-one counselling sessions and connected with her fellow mourners featured a poem called “The Rainbow Bridge”. Essentially, the Rainbow Bridge was an actual rainbow in the sky bridging the heavens of humans and pets. On the bridge, presumably, pet parents would be reunited with their hopping, crawling, jumping, running animals, and all would be well once more. It was very Hallmark, but it made Anna cry. She missed Ralph.
One night Anna dreamed about the Rainbow Bridge. She walked up its easy arch and at the top she saw a wooden bridgeway surrounded by clouds. A smaller connector intersected the walkway at the middle. Its steep hump led up and into a deep misty fog. Anna stood at the top of the arch on the bridgeway, waiting. Waiting and then she heard a soft, soft, clucking sound and little sharp thwacks at regular intervals. And she smelled hay. She looked at her hands and realized that she was gripping a box of raisins. Suddenly, jumping out of the midst into midair over the connector bridge she saw him, Ralph, her old rabbit.
He swiftly circled her ankles, nudging and kissing with his cold nose. And so, she sat slowly down, cross-legged, and let her bunny come to her.
When she woke up the next day it was rainy and there was a chill in the air—several degrees colder than usual that time of year. She had overslept again on her donuts, and the day seemed already to be a washout. She searched hard under her bed for her slippers, figuring that a little comfort might be motivational. Cameron was already long gone to his office. He had left a note on the mirror. It read “buy Columbian Gold brand, please!” It was obvious that he’d added the “please” in haste—it was crammed into the note corner. An afterthought.
Jamming her right foot into the slipper she felt a sharp small cardboard edge. This turned out to be a raisin box, lightly chewed, slightly damp. Some stray hay clung to the box.
“Ralphie!” “Ralphhhhie…” She called him, and, for a minute, she thought he nudged her ankle, but she was just brushing against the cold metal of her standing lamp.
Anna went into the kitchen to make tea and regroup. The counters were a mess, the flour cannister knocked over, salt spilled, garlic and cumin dumped in little clumps. The coffee cannister had also been knocked over, and ground Columbian gold was all over the floor. Because they were having issues with their heating system, Anna and Cameron had to leave their windows always cracked slightly, but not wide enough to allow easy burglary. Their apartment was ten floors up, without a fire escape. Maybe a small destructive bird had flown in? Or…
Were there pawprints in the flour? There were marks, but they were light. They could have been anything or nothing. Made by large mice, medium rats, marauding birds.
But Anna knew. She knew as she cleaned up all the coffee, all the flour, all the cumin. Her bunny missed her too. So, she decided to finally DO SOMETHING. And she made her ghost bunny a batch of honey donuts.
