The Story of the Rabbit Children by D. Dina Friedman

image by Ryan Chan via Unsplash

after the illustration by Sybille Von Olders (Germany) before 1916

​I.
This rabbit has too many children. Even if this may be the common case with rabbits, the picture is far too rosy. The ten rabbit children look like they’re on the brink of prancing. They're on two feet, not four, and holding each other’s hands. Again, a rosy choice. Did this mother rabbit have the choice to bear all these children? 

II.
In Germany, where this picture originated, abortion is technically illegal, but unpunished during the first twelve weeks–as long as you’re not too explicit. The picture is dated before 1916, but what happened in the 1930s—or in the 1940s, especially to children who didn’t have pure Aryan blood? Was there an urge to abort? A surge to abort? How many women pranced happily pregnant in ghettos until the soldiers came to take them away? 

III.
What does a baby think when it draws its first cry in a refugee camp in Rwanda? In a war zone in Ukraine? Or Gaza? When does that moment of pure innocence and infinite possibility first start to cloud over, like the feeling of the real world pricking hard at your edges after you’ve just come back from vacation? So much better to be in a painting like these happy rabbits prancing in paradise, which, on vacation, you try to capture with the snap of a camera as you tell yourself, this matters: this moment, where you can be as happy as the rabbit children. 

IV.
Before they get to the water, the rabbits must pass through a grove of trees whose trunks are so close together they look like prison bars. Beyond the trees is an open field, where the ground changes to a brighter green with yellow hues, brightened at the top by sky. Though the air takes up more than half the canvas, our eyes are drawn groundward to the happy rabbits, whose mother never had a choice whether or not to have them. Two of the rabbits have human faces. In the story, these are children the rabbit mother rescued and made rabbit suits to keep them warm. The children are in the lead, as if the artist is saying that humans, like Aryans, will always be superior. But nevertheless, let’s give the artist the benefit of the doubt. She wants things to be pretty. She wants the rabbits to be happy. She is letting the rabbits pass through the pressed together trees out toward the water, its wide expanse of promise.   

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D. Dina Friedman’s recent work includes a short-story collection, Immigrants, (Creators Press) and a poetry chapbook Here in Sanctuary—Whirling (Querencia Press).  She is also the author of the chapbook Wolf in the Suitcase (Finishing Line Press) and two young adult novels: Escaping Into the Night (Simon & Schuster) and Playing Dad’s Song (Farrar Straus Giroux). Dina has published widely in literary journals and received six Pushcart Prize and two Best of the Net nominations. Visit her website or her blog on living a creative life in a creatively challenged universe at: https://ddinafriedman.substack.com