The Runaway Bunny

By Kit Carlson

He put on the clothes I had washed for him—System of a Down T-shirt and torn Levis he liked to wear strapped across his butt. He slid feet into beat-up Vans and muttered “thank you,” as he lurched through the front door. I said nothing. I had nothing to say. He was going back to that house in College Park, back to delivering calzones to college kids and getting high. And so he did.

But not before he spent three days--sleeping, mostly--in the Sears captain’s bed from his childhood, shadowed posters of fading anime characters watching over him. I would peek into the dark room, remembering nights I watched him sleep, before his arms and legs grew too long for the bed. When he was awake, rage filled me so that I could barely speak. When he was asleep, though … that’s when the waves of grief rolled me over. But there was nothing, really, I could do, except to make sure he ate something now and then. And he did.

But not before we sat in the parking lot outside the Holy Cross emergency room. The ER seemed like the best plan, since he didn’t know why the mushrooms hit so hard, or how long it would take to come down. I had ranted some, on the way to the hospital: “Why on earth did you call your mother? You’re supposed to call your friends. I already dragged people to the ER after bad ’shrooms…when I was nineteen. I’ve done my time.” The rising sun blinded us through the windshield as we sat in a seemingly endless pause. “What do you want to do?” I asked. “I’m thinking,” he said. A long time later, he blinked. It looked like he remembered himself. “Can we just go to your house?” And we did.

But not before I found him running barefoot across the 7-Eleven parking lot, ignoring slabs of broken glass. We drove to the battered rental house to collect his shoes and saw his  four roommates dumping their backpacks into the trunk of a worn, green Corolla. “Where are they going?” I asked. “To class.” “Really?” I said. “To class. How fun it must be to go to class, when we are going off to the ER.” And they did. And we did.

But not before the phone jangled me awake at 6:30 a.m. I couldn’t realize at first what he was saying. “Mom…I just stole a pack of cigarettes from the 7-Eleven in College Park and I’m not wearing any shoes.” “Are you on drugs?” I asked. A very long pause. “That would be the problem.” The words slid out like solidifying honey, excruciating and thick. “I will come and find you,” I said. And I did.

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Kit Carlson is an Episcopal priest and a life-long writer with work appearing in publications as diverse as Seventeen Magazine and Anglican Theological Review. She has been a Pushcart Prize nominee, recently published in Rooted 2: An Anthology of the Best Arboreal Nonfiction, Burningword Literary Journal, Patuxent Literary Review, and The Windhover, and upcoming in River Teeth. She is author of Speaking Our Faith (Church Publishing, 2018). She lives in East Lansing, Michigan, with her husband Wendell, and Lola, a nervous rescue dog.