Having grown up in the deep south, I’m no stranger to all sorts of critters. The ones here come in all shapes and sizes, colors and IQ’s. IQ is the important statistic for you to remember in this story.
Now a lot of people believe that the larger the animal, the larger the intellectual capacity of that animal. This, in fact, is not the case. Down in my neck of the woods, it seems as though the larger the creature, the less intelligent it is. After a century or more of modern automobiles, deer still manage to stand in front of one, barreling down the road, spelling nothing more than impending doom. Even most of the humans around here can hardly speak in proper English, which brings me to a very important character in our story. He goes by the name of Dudley Farrow.
Now Dudley isn’t exactly what you could call the sharpest knife in the drawer, but I guess that’s what happens when your mother and father are as closely related as second cousins. No one knew that but Dudley and myself. He always hung around, and confided in me to keep some of his deepest, darkest secrets. You’re the only person that I have told his secret to, but you seem like you’re trustworthy enough. The great thing about having big, dumb friends, is that they are as loyal as a dog. That’s not to say that I take advantage of Dudley’s friendship at every chance I get, but it sure is nice to know that the option is there.Dudley, like a lot of other young men in the south, loves to hunt. A tour through his home is certainly not going to be enjoyed by any sort of animal lover. His home is a veritable who’s who of stuffed woodland creatures. Everything that was anything at one point or another, hung proudly on his wall, in these ridiculous and obscene poses. Dudley would swear that these poses all looked ‘so natural,’ but anyone with more than a half of a brain could see otherwise. Sadly enough, I had the opportunity to meet most of these animals that Dudley had hanging about his home about a week before they ever made it there. My home was conveniently between Dudley’s favorite hunting grounds and his home, so anytime he managed to end some creatures miserable existence, he made sure to bring the corpse by my place in the back of his truck to tell me his war stories while I pretended to ‘ooh and ahh’ at his prize. Some of the stories Dudley would cook up would make you think that he had just come home from ‘Nam and that he had somehow managed to take out fifty slant-eyes with no more than the little plastic toothpick out of a Swiss Army Knife.
One day, Dudley came by my house and welcomed himself inside. He found me sitting on my couch watching television, and beckoned me outside to see what he had killed. Something about today was different though. Dudley looked perplexed and concerned. Well, to be honest, Dudley always managed to wear a confused look on his face, but this day, he managed to wear it extra well.
I drug myself off of my sofa, and proceeded to the door, a little more interested in Dudley’s conquest than normal. I trotted out to his truck, and peered into the bed to find three rabbits, two of which looked entirely normal. The third, however, had a massive skull. It must have been twice the size of the others. Dudley had told me that he had planned on eating these three, but upon inspection of the one with the unusually large head, he deduced that it must have had some sort of disease, and it would be better if he just threw her out. I nodded in agreement, partly because I didn’t know what else to do, and partly because I probably wouldn’t have eaten it either if it had been up to me.
I went back inside, and resumed business as usual, but I couldn’t help but to think of what sort of life this female bunny must have led. I decided to name her Marie, after Marie Curie. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Marie Curie, she was a physicist who was a pioneer in the field of radioactivity, who died from aplastic anemia, which was almost certainly contracted by her exposure to radiation.
* * *
Today started off as another normal day for Marie the bunny. She awoke whenever she pleased, and slowly slid back into her state of crippling depression. Marie had a brain the size of a planet, but no one around her to indulge her in thought. Her ideas were wasted on the likes of the other rabbits in her general vicinity. Marie’s thought processes rivaled those of Albert Einstein, and she had in fact, unbeknownst to all of mankind, become the most intelligent creature on the planet. While she did all of the things that ordinary rabbits do, Marie had ideas about life, science, and mathematics, bursting from her skull constantly, and she had never managed to find a way to turn these thoughts off.
In keeping with rabbit tradition, Marie had a bunny partner, who was just as simple and as ordinary as any other rabbit in existence. He, however, has no name. A creature that insignificant, without any kind of intelligent thought process doesn’t need a name. He and Marie had already had twenty baby bunnies together. Each one, Marie hoped, would get some sort of her intellect. She had only agreed to mating because she had such high hopes for her children. She longed for another creature to communicate with, but when all of her children were born just as any other rabbit had been, she decided that her intelligence was a disease, and that her skull was the size that it was because of a massive tumor. This, however, was not the case.
Marie had been around humans and modern day civilization enough to assume that she needed medical attention. And while doctors in a hospital wouldn’t be receptive to giving medical attention to a bunny that just waltzed through their front door, Marie had thought of another kind of doctor that she had heard humans talking about… a veterinarian.
This day, Marie decided, was a fine day to fix all of her problems. She decided that she would hop into town, and sneak inside the vet’s office, posing as the pet of some neighborhood child, who desperately needed a tumor removed, and upon having her surgery, she would be just like every other bunny, and wouldn’t be burdened with such thoughts as the ones that plagued her day in and day out.
She set out. It was a hot and sticky day with no breeze in sight. Marie was hopping through a clearing with nothing but a glaring sun overhead. Her head burst with profound ideas about the sun and the other distant stars. She managed to shake these thoughts out of her head, but they were replaced immediately after by thoughts of the species of plants that she was passing by. “Soon,” she said to herself, “all this will be over, and I will finally know what it is like to be happy.” No sooner did these words leave her bunny brain, she heard a very loud noise, and less than one-hundredth of a second later, she was met by a piece of metal, which tore straight through her chest, leaving her dead on contact. This was about the time that Dudley walked over to retrieve her body and end a rather long day of hunting.
After her body had been shown to nearly everyone in town, Dudley and his wife Grace decided that it would be best if they did not eat this rabbit in particular. They assumed what she had assumed when she was alive, that her unusually large head must have meant that she had some sort of disease and would be harmful if consumed, and that was not a risk that Dudley was not willing to take.
This may not have been the path to happiness that Marie had been hoping for, but it worked just as well. Marie had no disease, and her body had been wasted. Dudley and Marie, no matter how drastically different from one another, both made the mistake that millions of people do on a daily basis. Just because someone is different from everyone, or in this case, everything else, doesn’t mean that there is something wrong with them.
-uninspired.scribe
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