J is for Enlightenment

The jackalope is large.

When you are within dismemberment distance of an animal many times larger than you, certain mammalian instincts kick in. My skin lit on fire, a mix of itch and heat and pain burrowing through the pores. My scalp attempted to peel itself from my skull and run. An electrical current sizzled up my spine and demanded a response.

But I just stood there. I’d like to say that a calm came over me, that my mind vibrated at an ancient frequency and I prepared myself for enlightenment. But I was simply scared pissless, and couldn’t manage to move one muscle.

Then I remember a small detail. I have an illogical fear of rabbits. Something about the way they stare at you blankly, silently. Cat goes meow, cow goes moo. What the hell sound does a rabbit make? I’ll tell you. When they’re dying, they squeal. Otherwise, they watch you in the night with their dead doll gaze and they whisper to the woods.

And the jackalope before me was the one who listened to them, who sat burrowed in the heart of one of those great forests, of the black forests, the places where lost children meet witches, the deep dark forest floors where things are dragged away to be hidden or eaten, and the rabbits watch with blank, silent stares and whisper what they have seen to the jackalope, their dark rabbit god.

And then he whispered to me.

I was wrong about enlightenment. It burns.

Somehow, I’m here now, a whole past behind me that I don’t remember as my own. I look in the mirror and poke at my features, wondering if they’ve always been mine. And at night, I don’t sleep. I only enter a dark forest in my mind and listen to whispers from as many times and places and worlds as there are rabbits.

Deacon