📘 Keeping it weird - "Dead Bunny Hopping"
The value and gamble of the avant garde
Entertainment and community. Those were our two goals on The Dad. Entertainment was measured through engagement. Engagement was achieved through hilarious, heartfelt, and mostly relatable content.
BUT…
You gotta keep em on their toes. I saw it as my own personal content vision to keep it weird to mix it up. Usually it bombed. But I wanted to throw in some offbeat memes, videos, and essays that you would never see otherwise. Totally surprising pieces of content. Sometimes surprising like “Wow, didn’t see that coming.” But often surprising like “Wow, wish I never saw that.”
That’s just the gamble you take.
I’ve said The Dad content mosaic was comedy punctuated by sentiment. So the rhythm was comedy, comedy, comedy, BAM! emotion. But perhaps it’s more like comedy, comedy, comedy, weird content, comedy, comedy, BAM! emotion.
Before The Dad I was invited on the Inside Voice podcast with Jennifer Scharf. It was a lovely time. I believe I was on as “Joel Ryan”, since I was still running The Glad Stork anonymously.
The podcast was mostly parents, mostly moms actually, talking about relatable parenting topics, some funny, some serious and important. Because the guests were content creators and writers, they were all asked to read something they wrote on the podcast, usually a personal essay.
In the spirit of keeping it weird, I decided to read a short story I wrote, imagining a gritty, realistic version of Little Bunny Foo Foo.
So today, for the first time, I am “publishing” that short story.
DEAD BUNNY HOPPING
Their screams still haunted him. They drifted in and out of his cage in the darkness of night, just as he was about to sleep, wafting between the bars, hovering above him, shrieking in terror, making his fur stand on end, his ears at attention.
He fidgeted in the cramped space extending his back legs out until his paws reached through openings in his cage and into the moonlight, which trickled through a 6 by 6 inch glass block window. He looked closely. Phew. The fur on his foot was still white. No blood this time. But there had been blood. So much blood.
I thought my feet were supposed to be lucky?, he thought. His feet were the very things that got him into this mess. Maybe they’re only lucky AFTER they’re amputated? He should’ve lopped them off after the first incident. It was only a year ago, but in his mind the memory of the tragic night had already blurred into a blotch of blood-red anxiety.
He had just put in a long shift at the new burrow. His rapidly growing family needed more space. He found a nice little spot on the other side of the forest. He spent hours digging. Maybe I’ll put in vaulted ceilings? Laura would like that, he thought. As he hopped back home, he thought of his children. A smile snuck onto his face.
That’s when he heard the chanting. His nose twitched. His whiskers reached for the darkness that surrounded him. It started as a murmur, almost a whisper. The wind carried the voices through the trees and into his fuzzy ears and the volume increased. Then he realized: children. The chanting voices were children. The sounds were angelic in tone, but in the context of the dark forest and the repetition of their demanding words, the whole situation felt demonic.
The forest around him erupted in a flash of blinding white light. His head pulsed with the sound of shattering glass. His vision blurred and the trees spun around him like a carousel. His heart felt like it was going to explode. He felt his hind leg crushing the skulls of countless defenseless creatures. So much bopping. So much death. The screams of the field mice echoed off the trees and reverberated in his large ears. The destruction of life fed him and made him stronger. He passed out.
He woke in a puddle of blood. Small disfigured skeletons floated in the dark liquid around him. His back leg was bright red. The children laughed loudly—but he looked around, and he was alone. Even the insects dissipated and evacuated the forest, afraid of the bloody monster he had become.
He should have amputated his foot then. He could have prevented the other incidents. The other deaths.
Outside the prison, the families of the field mice gathered. There were thousands. My God, he thought. What have I done? Many of them held signs in protest. Others held a single candle. All of them wanted vengeance. All of them wanted his death.
The heavy door of solitary confinement opened with a bang. The warden entered.
“It’s time,” the warden said.
“B-b-b, but, what about my last meal?” the bunny asked.
The warden tossed a single baby carrot into the cage and laughed maniacally.
He clutched it to his chest and scurried out, led by the warden’s chain connected to his shackled hind legs.
Hopping down the corridor, the other prisoners glared at him from their cells. All of them were menacing, hardened criminals. I’m not one of them, am I? Their mouths opened to speak but he only heard the voices of the children, the very voices that prompted his murderous rampage. They went,
“Little Bunny Foo Foo
Went hopping through the forest
Scooping up the field mice
And bopping them on the head.”
Oh God… Oh God…
The door at the end of the corridor opened and he saw her. Her dress flowed violently outward, her thin legs hung below, hovering above the floor. Her busy wings flickered in gray next to her black silhouette. Her wand! Christ, her wand! She held the instrument of death loosely between her forefinger and thumb.
His fur was drenched in sweat. His entire life had led him to this moment. He could have been so much more. Things were supposed to be different. Where is my family? Did they finish the large burrow in the forest? Have they already forgotten me?
The warden strapped him to the table.
“Please don’t do this,” the bunny said.
The warden paused. He glanced over at the Good Fairy. A large smile grew on her stoic face, revealing very tiny, bright white teeth, sharpened to points. They both laughed so hard their torsos shook.
He took a deep breath, knowing it would be his last. He savored it. He felt relaxed until he heard the screams again.
With a flick of a wrist, the wand went “POOF!” and the bunny’s body went limp.
The Good Fairy cackled and looked into the security monitor.
“Hare today… goon tomorrow,” she said.
I’m not sure the episode is around anymore, but after I finished Jennifer said something like “Wow.”
I said, “Ya know it’s funny because my brother is a firefighter. He’s out there literally saving lives and I am reading Little Bunny Foo Foo fan fiction on the internet.”
This here is why we are newsletter friends 😆 Nachmanovitch might call this “Free Play”