Read Online A Girl Named Zippy by Haven Kimmel - Free Book Online Page B

there was a sizable, bunny-shaped portion of my index finger missing, and blood was running out steadily, dripping onto first my shoes, and then Dad’s.
    “Didn’t you feel that rabbit biting you?” he asked, wide-eyed with disbelief.
    “No,” I said, thinking maybe he was a little sensitive because of his maggot. “I reckon I was hypnotized.”
    Dad looked at my mom, stricken. “She thinks she was hypnotized by a rabbit.”
    “Well, stranger things have happened,” Mom said, carefully not looking at my dad’s bandaged finger.
    “Get in the house.” Dad ordered me by pointing with his cigarette in the general direction of the living room window.
    I got up slowly, cradling my bleeding finger. I deeply dreaded what was in store for me: much Ivory soap and hot water, followed by enough iodine to paint our front porch. No way would he settle for mercurochrome, either. We’d be lucky if he didn’t go collect the head of the rabbit and send it to the game warden, just to be sure.
    My sister came in the bathroom where I was sitting on the toilet lid, dejectedly waiting for Dad to collect sterile gauze pads and surgical tape.
    “I didn’t know rabbits were meat eaters,” she said, looking at my bright orange hand.
    “Petey’s rabbits are.” I still could not believe that a white bunny was capable of such carnage.
    “Do you think he knew that rabbit was going to bite you?”
    “I don’t know why else he brought it over. I’m afraid we can’t go camping now, too.”
    “You handle pain so well, sweetie,” Melinda said, standing up.
    “Well, I was hypnotized.”
    She walked out into the den, where Dad was still rooting through the medicine cabinet with his good hand. I heard her asking him about the camping trip, and his reply about how we’d be risking infection at every turn, including from the many, many bacteria that lived in the lake.
    “What does Mom think?”
    “I don’t know. She’s still out in the camper, counting Sterno.”
    Dad came in and bandaged up my finger until it was roughly the size of a lemon, then went out to begin the arduous process of uncamping. He found my mom sitting at the little table in the trailer, reading a book.
    A few weeks later, while I was playing in the backyard, Petey and his much older brother, Billy, and their dad came barreling out of their house, John and Billy sounding huge and dumb and scary, Petey screeching around them importantly. I dashed around and hid behind my dad’s tool shed, peeking my head out periodically to see what they were doing.
    They each had a tool of some kind—I couldn’t see clearly what the tools were—but all three of them looked dangerous. Petey ducked into the barn and came out with a rabbit, which he handed to his dad. John held it by the neck, then crossed its long ears at the top, held them up to the side of the barn and stapled them there with a staple gun. Billy stepped up with a wicked-looking little hatchet, and whack! the rabbit’s body was separated from its head, which remained stapled to the side of the barn.
    Headless bodies really do hop around for a couple seconds; this was one of the indisputable lessons of Mooreland, Indiana. I saw probably four or five such bodies bleed their life out and fall down before my dad came out looking for me. By this time I was standing right out in plain sight, in roughly the same spot I had stood just a year before, watching Minnie Hodson take the head off a chicken for Sunday dinner. That patch of ground was a front-row seat for nature’s theater: years later I could stand right there and look at the grave of a much-loved and long-lost dog.
    Dad didn’t stop to converse with me. He crossed our yard in just a few steps, and before the Scroggs men even knew he was there he had the hatchet out of Billy’s hand and John up against the bloody wall of the barn, Dad’s left forearm hard against his throat. Dad had on the face that no one in this world would choose to be faced