Go forth and multiply.

The rabbit was tiny, a nut of fur in your hand: jumping, scampering, hiding. It was time, you said, and I agreed. Time to decouple, to multiply. Time to become breeders. Like rabbits. Time to quit the worldwide whirl, time to stay home. Now, there was time enough to love a pet, in rehearsal for the greater love to come. The rabbit was a girl, so we gave her your names: the first for herself and the second for your line.

She, blithely unaware, crunched carrots, munched leaves; oblivious to the greatness that been thrust upon her. The youngest in the family, she bore her burden lightly – more lightly, perhaps, than her kidnapped sister, whose custody you had lost in an unhappier parting. That loss pained you still: the loss of your spirit guide, familiar, companion and daemon. The rabbit: always gentle, always curious, always exploring – and vegetarian, to boot – easy, perhaps, to fit into your stories; a trickster god for your mythology.

And so there we were, a happy strange little family: and the baby rabbit became a girl, grew abruptly into a teen, and then the trouble began. Fierce and wild, she was too fecund, too feisty: her reproductive vigour threatened our peace – and her life. Rabbits, like humans, are always in heat: their overstrained ovaries and womb primed to explode into malignant fervour. The solution, both convenient and excusable: the removal of her sex, the extraction of the female.

Affectionate; playful; safe: un-gendered. Is it what she would have chosen, if she had a voice? Godlike, we made that diabolical choice for her. She would never have children: her Fibonacci sequence would both begin and end at unity. But nor would her cells ever give themselves over to an orgy of microscopic multiplication: no misshapen, misdirected malignancy could ever take hold in her voided belly.

If she resented our decision, she gave no sign: slept in the sun, leapt on the furniture. Scratched at the carpet.

Still, we were busy with larger concerns; a bun in the oven, ha ha. A grey peanut floating in empty black space; an embryo with two names: one for itself and one for its line.  Unseen, we fed it, protected it: waited for it. And so your belly swelled, grew: so quickly, we marvelled: so early. But for all its haste, it was an easy pregnancy, at least at first: the weeks and months flew by without care.

But the next time, there was only the black void: the peanut had crumbled away. Had it been merely a phantom, no more solid than the high-frequency echo it returned from the void? We wondered perhaps if it had never been there at all: perhaps our longing had given it form, made it real. A hysterical pregnancy: a wish turned into a promise that could never be kept.

But what was there was the pale ghost looming over the space it had fled. A grainy, pendulous balloon, swollen and engorged: rich from its diet of the past months, a monstrous twin to the vanished grey blob. And in due course, the balloon burst. Thence the headlong, heartless rush to remove the crucible in which infection had brewed. To unsex you: first with knives, then with drugs. First, the primaries of your sex; then the secondary.

Affectionate; playful; safe; ungendered. I wondered, in my hard-headed way, at the synchronicity. You, more magically minded, said the rabbit had shown you the way: your spirit guide, it had proven that the malfunctioning engine of gender could be mended. That the prophylaxis was a worthwhile sacrifice: that life could still be worth living. Sex might start in the body; but it ended in the head.

To others, too, the rabbit was a symbol: a dumb proxy for the children we would never have, an escape from the end of your line – and mine. Careless tongues dubbed her “the baby”: a coinage as accurate as it was offhandedly cruel. You were cast as the woman who gave birth to rabbits; Hogarthian curiosity remade in modern flesh. And yet even this freakish line of descent was severed, tied off: for the rabbit could not make more rabbits.

And in time, your womb wandered further: to the consternation of the medical men, it lived on and appeared in places far from its home. Its rogue cells found new places to fester. And things took their course.

Last year, I extended my pilgrimage beyond your meadow to the quiet white stands by the icy northern sea. There, on a cropped green field, I watched as an army of rabbits emerged in the sunset. Razored grass: thumped their feet: danced into the hedgerows. Cousins, perhaps, to those who leave their spoor round your grave: a ruminant offering to one of their own.

Our rabbit, today, is quiet and lonely: she sits in the shadow as much as the sun.

And now, on the hard-pounded road to your resting place, I see, ahead of me, the shape of a tiny black rabbit: hopping into the grey of the motorway tarmac. I brake, but it is too close, too sudden: but the car swoops over the rabbit, unscathed through the wheels. And I see in my mirror the shape of it passing, slipping over the horizon: and I wish it farewell, and then it is gone. ##