Dead Rabbits
Flash Fiction Contest First Runner-Up
Michael’s dad died, so we went off to smoke by the BART tracks. Everything meant more when we were stoned, every leaf, every rock, every half-assed piece of graffiti work. I hadn’t seen Michael in a year. He was going to some art high school now, and smoking was the only thing we had in common anymore. My dad told me to do it. Not to go and get high, but to talk to him. He knew we’d been close. So, I texted Michael, telling him I had this real sticky purple shit if he wanted some, not saying anything about his dad.
I picked him up that Saturday. The sun was just sitting its ass down on top of the buildings, sick and tired of being up there in the sky all day. I drove because that felt like the right thing to do. I’d never known anyone my age who’d lost a parent. My grandma had died, and I’m sure that must have been shitty for the people who knew her better than I did; still, it was one of those any-day-now type of things. Michael’s dead dad was like global warming or a giant meteor crash or a nuclear war. You knew it was gonna happen sooner or later, but fuck, you didn’t think it was gonna happen now.
Michael got in my car. His eyes were bloodshot and he had his hair straightened over his face like the kids that used to take those selfies on MySpace. I forgot how skinny he was, and that reminded me of the rumors. When I first met him, he’d been this chubby sixth-grader who drew cartoons of rabbits at recess. We’d both been new to this fancy Catholic middle school, and we were both mixed. Two flakes of Wheaties in a bowl of milk. Michael’s dad was from Egypt and proud of that. He wore big suits and jewelry. He sold rugs, and rugs were, apparently, really fucking expensive. My father’s parents were from Mexico, and my dad wasn’t so proud of that. I was always kind of jealous of Michael, how his dad claimed him, like he was his Egyptian son, and he never had to question that. My dad had me just to water down the horchata. Just to have something over his brother. Look at me and my white family.
Michael set his backpack on the floorboard. “My mom told me to bring snacks, so I brought snacks.”
“Thanks,” I said. “How’s art school?”
“You don’t have to do the homework. And everyone’s on Xanax.”
I nodded and tried to listen, but the whole time my brain was going: dead dad dead dad dead dad.
“Hey, you still draw the cartoons? The rabbits and all that?” The thing about the rabbits, the thing I'd forgotten, was that every time Michael drew them, they were dead.
Michael bobbed his head a few times, not like he was saying yes, but like there was some song playing. For a moment, I thought I messed everything up.
“Nah, that’s lil kid shit,” he said, low and mysterious.
“Well, what do you do now?”
Michael showed me how to get there. There, a basketball court a few blocks down from the Rockridge BART station. I parked next to the court, and Michael pointed to the overpass beside it.
“There’s a hill underneath there, and if you sit on top, right under the freeway, it feels just like an earthquake.”
So, we got our things and walked past the chain link fence and the basketball hoops, heading for the hill under the freeway. A few years earlier we might have been happy enough to stay at the courts and play 21. A few years later and Michael would be dead. But that day we climbed the hill, through the ivy as thick as rope, rolled ourselves a joint, and smoked it, while the cars shuddered back and forth above us.
The rumors about Michael getting kicked out had been like this: he’d taken too much acid and gone crazy. He’d emailed a dick pic to the principal. He’d threatened to shoot up the school. He’d tried to kill himself in the boys’ locker room.
The rumors had been told so many times they stopped being possibilities and became a progression. A story of madness.
“So where’s this masterpiece?” I asked, my stoned voice sounding creaky and faraway.
“We gotta wait for the train.”
I imagined a BART train covered in graffiti like the subway cars I’d seen in movies about New York.
At the bottom of the hill was a BART track with a chain link fence running the length of each side, barbed wire on top. The fence on our side looked old and rusted in places, but for the most part it seemed no different from the other fence. Then, there was a high whistle and a screech, and in a hushed, church-like voice, Michael said, “Here it comes.” And in that moment before the train came bursting through the dark of the tunnel, it could have been anything.
The fence on our side came alive. The rust wasn’t rust, it was paint. The train wasn’t the canvas, it was the backdrop. And as the train went by, the painting began to move like the little flip books I played with as a kid. Maybe you won’t believe me, but I saw it. I saw a little brown rabbit and a big brown rabbit running side by side. I wanted to shake Michael, ask him how he did it. But I didn’t say a word. I sat with my friend, the freeway above us, until his rabbits stopped running and all his paint turned back to rust.
Ryan Jones (@ryan_jones_30) is an Oakland writer living in Sacramento, California. He has been published in Alchemy and Litro magazine. He is a graduate of Saint Mary’s MFA program.