Perry and Jen and Araceli had lost one of their rabbits too young. Perry knew that Bloomer had been approaching the lead edge of the earliest bands of the predicted life spans for rabbits – she had been about to turn six – but she had been healthy, and bright-eyed, and still leaping in the mornings. He couldn’t believe it was really her time to depart.

She had spent an entire morning in one spot, tucked into a cautious loaf, and had not eaten; but she had done that before. She had always snapped out of it by later in the same day, or at the longest by the next morning.

But this time, she did not start eating again, and barely changed positions. She only shifted around to press herself more closely up against the wall.

She ate a bit of banana but left the rest of the slice on the floor untouched, which was unprecedented for her. She would lap from a bowl of water set before her, but just for a moment.

The second day, a Saturday, all three of them drove her to the vet. They were nearly silent, Ara in back with her arms draped over the carrier. They came home with motility medications and packets of concentrated rabbit food. Bloomer would eat those as they slowly fed them to her from a feeding syringe, swallow by swallow, but she was clearly failing.

Toward the end of the third day it was clear she was not getting better.

“Do we keep doing this?” Jen asked. “She doesn’t even look comfortable now.”

“I want to know we gave her every chance we could,” Perry said.

They’d had a rabbit actually die far younger, at only two, but that one – Selkie – had had an apparent heart attack. Somehow his instant passing, which was unmarked by them when it happened – he had died overnight inside his area, his teeth frozen clamped down mid-chew on a strand of hay – made Perry feel like that particular rabbit had simply been destined to be short-lived. Something had been congenitally very wrong, clearly. Very soon after the initial shock of finding him, Perry just thought of him as the rabbit who was doomed to live a short life. They also simply hadn’t had time to get close to him; and Araceli had been very young, not interested in interacting with him.

But Bloomer had been their covid isolation rabbit, so they spent days on end with her. They included her in conversations, and asked her advice about jigsaw puzzles, and masks, and boosters. Araceli interacted with her. She would make her tiny leis and garlands and have her parents try to take quick pictures before Bloomer tossed them off.

At the end of the fifth day, Bloomer’s breathing was labored, rasping. Perry sat on the floor and cradled her on his lap, at the very end.

*

They buried her in their back yard next to a patch of sedge. Perry dug the hole. Jen brought out a potted flower which she and Ara planted on top.

“Look!”

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Ara pointed to a deer which was standing in the yard, having entered unnoticed while the three of them tended to the burial. It just stood and looked at them.

“It’s like he came to pay his respects,” Jen said.

*

There was a hole in their home. Bloomer had left them too soon.

Perry would stop and regard the grave when he took out compost or just went outside to get away from a screen.

“We miss you, Bloomer. We all do.”

He would add:

“We’re still here. We’re right inside.”

Sometimes he would tell her:

“Selkie’s next to you. You would have liked him.” They had buried him just a few feet over, on the edge of the same sedge patch.

And someday Whistler will join them, he said to himself.

Perry felt he was spending an unreasonable amount of time reflecting on their departed rabbit’s condition. But he couldn’t stop thinking about her alone in the yard when she had spent six years with them on their rugs, beneath their beds, in their kitchen.

Now she was outside. Forever. So he hoped that somehow she could feel the presence of Selkie. And of the living animals that passed by; the squirrels, raccoons. Even the foxes. And all the birds overhead. And the deer. He stopped by her grave to stand quietly, often, but he thought about the day, someday, when they would move away. She would then be out here alone.

He hoped she would take solace in the presence of the others. Animals must have an awareness, he thought, that there were others all around them, and above, and maybe below. He and Jen had had a running joke about Bloomer’s interactions with the mice that infiltrated their home in the winter. “Welcome back, guys. Food’s in the kitchen,” she would tell them.

He hoped she would feel a presence nearby when she was buried, immobile, underground.

As he himself might come to feel if he were ever locked away, immobile, underground. If he would someday be lost to everyone still living. If he would be forgotten to even his descendents, though they lived right above him.

People would pass over him, very likely, unaware that he was beneath.

People did pass over. It would have to happen. No graveyard was forever. No white case was guaranteed to be remembered.

How long does it take people to forget?

Somehow he would have an awareness of vibrations. He was immobile, and not precisely living, but he felt movement. Everything from patter which must have been footsteps, to longer waves which might have come from vehicles, to – occasionally – tremors and shocks. Those might have been from actual earthquakes, or very heavy machinery, or building demolitions.

And he felt that there were others around, not far from him, also immobile. Some had been there long already, he felt. They might have been surrounded by scattered arrowheads. Others, from closer to his time, but also forgotten. And still more recent companions, maybe laid down into that earth in tragic circumstances.

Animals?

Yes, there were animals. Their running had been stilled; they wanted to continue to run.

Some had had four legs, he could feel. Others, wings. Some would have been inclined to follow him; others would have ignored him, and ignored him now.

The beings above were not everything there was to the world. They had forgotten him, but he had not quite departed. He felt he would never be taken away completely.