I'll tell you about the blue winter dawn I tromped out to the raspberry briars back of the shed, boots punching holes in the snow. I'll tell you what my father said: "I dreamed we got one and look here." I'll tell you about my father's wind-chapped hands lifting that rabbit from the trap and holding it up to me, and how the rabbit's back legs kicked and kicked while breath steamed from its nostrils.

I'll tell you what our house looked like in the distance, small and square and brick, smoke rising from the chimney, the kitchen window a smear of butter-yellow light. My mother is inside frying eggs. The coffee pot hisses. Country music, tinny and bright, crackles from the radio by the fridge.

Back of the shed it's quiet: wind over snow, bare locust limbs clacking against each other in the woods. From outside town comes the stuttering sound of semi-trailers jake-braking on the I-65 exit ramp, the sky opening up above them, and above cornfields and creeks, and our little church whose steeple was struck by lightning last summer, and above the sagging vinyl-sided trailers in Happy Village trailer park, and above the sprawl of the Suburu-Isuzu plant with its 10,000 gleaming Outbacks in the parking lot waiting to be shipped and sold. And I'm breathing. And my father is breathing. And the rabbit is breathing. The claw-hammer, gripped loosely in my father's right hand—its nicked metal head and worn wooden handle—is not breathing.

I'll tell you about the cords of firewood in the shed and how we stacked them that fall while sycamore leaves spiraled down around us. I'll tell you how my mother brought out glasses of iced tea, and how my father held his to his sweating forehead for a second before drinking it down in a single gulp. I'll tell you how watching my father lift an axe high in the air and bring it straight down, hard, again and again into chunks of black oak, filled me with lust for muscle and blood and brute strength and breaking things.

I've watched him use his hands to push up his glasses, bait a fishing hook, fillet redear sunfish and smallmouth bass and catfish and crappie and perch, grease a chainsaw chain, pull off a clip-on tie after church and toss it onto the bed. I've watched him break open fried eggs with a fork. I've watched him jam his fingers into a bowling ball and send it barreling down the lane to splash apart the pins.

I'm so small in that blue backyard both my hands together can't grip the circumference of his forearms.

How unreal the rabbit seems to me, the wetness of its black eyes, the sunburst of blood vessels in the translucent pink of its ear. Or no, not unreal—realer than real. Realer than our yard and house. Realer even than snow and sky and wind. This creature kicking its legs and shivering—this creature my father dreamed into the trap—has materialized from a dream the world is having about itself. It is small, frightened, beautiful, wild.

And I'll tell you: that's why we have to kill it.


.

Steve Edwards is the author of BREAKING INTO THE BACKCOUNTRY, a memoir. He lives in Massachusetts.

"The Truest Thing I Know" is a finalist for the Mythic Picnic Prize in Fiction.

Read his postcard.

Detail of photo on main page courtesy of Emeline Yulb.

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