Not Your Father’s Waffles – Part 1

Not entirely sure what to write today. 

That’s a rarity for me, honestly.  Dreams alone account for so many ideas that I lose half of them before breakfast and I still have way too many. 

My sleep the last few days has been the sleep of the damned.  Or the righteous.  Some variety of virtue or lack thereof has been involved.  No dreams to speak of.  Instead, I’ve been left with a feeling of ‘awakeness’ that I haven’t had in what feels like forever.  I’m not tired.

I don’t mean ‘I’m still tired but I got good sleep so it’s taken the edge off’.  No.  For a few blissful hours today, I wasn’t tired.  I didn’t feel exhausted, or worn out, or anything else.  I was simply alive, and capable of rational thought without the need to blow all the rust off my brain first.  It’s a novel experience, that level of alertness.  Even with caffeine, you can feel the tired pulling at the chains, straining to chase you down. 

And yet…

So I’m bright and bouncy.  I’ve had coffee.  I’ve played video games.  I’ve spent quality time with the wife.  I’ve put in a few applications.  I’m raring and ready to go with this writing that I still don’t have any ideas about.  But that’s okay.  95% of writing is just refusing to admit defeat with an idea.  So I refuse to give in, even when I truly have nothing to write.  I’ll just make words until something comes of it.

Not Your Father’s Waffles- Part 1

I hadn’t realized the world as we know it would end when my rabbit died.  You usually attribute the apocalypse to something enormous; a nuclear bomb, a horrible plague, an unstoppable virus. 

Nope.  Forget all that.  The world ended because of a bunny rabbit.

Before he died my rabbit hadn’t been anything special.   A little on the hungry side, a little on the especially lazy side, but a wonderful friend.  I cried more than I should’ve, but my mother hadn’t scolded me.  Ferdinand had been the last gift of my father, and I had been more than a little upset at both my father’s departure and Ferdinand’s so soon after him.

I was eating crisped rice on waffles the morning the world became doomed.  I remember it clearly; the half empty glass of orange juice, my phone resting underneath the book I had placed over it.  Ferdinand had appeared on the table.  No noise, no warning; one moment I had been morosely pushing cereal across my waffle, the next a rabbit was staring at me from across the table. 

For a brief moment, I was elated.  Maybe I had been wrong, maybe Ferdinand hadn’t been dead after all.  Then I saw the eyes staring at me.  They were intelligent, those eyes.  Dark and deep and knowing.  There were no pupils, simply one unbroken sheath of blackness that covered what had once been eyes.  They stared unblinking at me, quietly assessing.  Weighing.  Dismissing. 

The clatter of my fork hitting the table shattered the silent tableau.  Ferdinand laughed then.  At least I believe it was him; his tiny mouth remained immobile.  The laughter wasn’t mine, however, and it was filled with a humor that bore no relation to mirth.  It was dark, angry laughter.  It was full of barely suppressed hatred, of things dark and silent and watchful.  Of things that shouldn’t be, yet are.

Ferdinand stared, laughing without moving, full of more malice than I had ever encountered.  My pants were wet, and the acrid stink of urine filled the small nook that we called a dining room.  I couldn’t have looked away if I had wanted to.  It was then that Ferdinand spoke, words that I would never forget.  Words that rattled in my brain as though delivered by electric shock. 

“Yours is the soul which shall end the world.  Fear, despair, and rejoice, for the era of man is ended.”

To be continued…

Rabbitfully, 
Justin