FEATURE: “Jackalope” by Colton Merris

They tell you when you’re quitting anything that it’s normal for the dreams to come. You pick your best, most loyal friend in the whole world and lose them, and it’s not long before you dream of them. Grief counselors will tell you it’s the same thing that happens during divorce. Any clean drunk can attest that during three months of putting their turkeys on ice, all their dreams take place in bars, and all their family members turn into big bottles of booze. 

I was dreaming of rabbits swimming in barbed wire when we went out to the cabin in Idaho for vacation. My wife said, “Maybe you are the rabbits, and the barbed wire is cigarettes.” As we pulled up to the cabin, she put a hand on my thigh and said, “It hurts to take the barbed wire out, but you have to.” 

In the back seat, Jacky boy tapped away on the iPad. He said, “What happened to Bluey?” He turned the iPad around, there was a little white millstone turning on his cartoon friend’s head.

Jo pulled her phone out of her jacket and said, “Ope, sorry my little Jackalope. No signal! I guess we’re all going to have to have fun together! No more screens, just clean air and good old fashion grass touching.”

Jo was the kind of cute and sweet you think I found her in an Easter Egg. 

“But Mom, what am I going to watch?” Jacky asked.

Jo got out of the car and said, “You can watch the grass grow, or you can help me carry everything inside.

We all got out of the car and that’s when we saw it: the rabbit. It was chewing some leaves over by the bushes. But something was wrong with the rabbit. Thick, black bushels grew around its face. At first it looked like some sort of black seaweed, except the seaweed didn’t droop when it turned its face toward us. Instead, it twisted and gnarled, like horns. Blood crusted around the roots of the horns, and they grew from the rabbit’s cheeks, down by its chin, and up above its brows. 

“What’s wrong with bunny?” Jacky asked.

“I don’t know, he kind of looks like a Jackalope,” I said. 

Jacky gasped. “That’s me!” he asked, “What’s a Jackalope?

“It’s a rabbit with horns. They’re magic, like unicorns or the Loch Ness monster.” 

Jacky took off toward the rabbit, saying, “I want a magic rabbit!” 

“Jacky no! Don’t touch that thing!” Jo said, but Jacky didn’t listen, and chased the rabbit into the woods. We dropped our luggage in the grass and followed him. His little first-grader legs didn’t take him very far, and Jo wrenched him by an elbow. 

“I said no,” Jo hissed. Just as she was about to pull Jacky away back to the cabin, she stopped. “Hun?” She called. “Hun, I need you to look at this.” 

I caught up, knelt down by them. “What’s up?”

Jo pointed past the bushes. “Look.”

I followed her hand, and just past the clearing were more rabbits. Maybe a dozen of them. They all huddled in a circle, so all we saw were their fuzzy butts, those little cottontails sticking up. One stuck up its head, chewing something pink, something dripping. This ones face was covered in barbs too. 

Jacky whispered, “Lots of magic rabbits.” He took a step forward, and a twig cracked beneath his light-up Pokemon shoe. All the rabbits’ ears shot up, and they bolted into the woods, a mass of fur and black barbs whooshing through the grass, into the bushes, leaving behind a mass of fur and flesh.

I reached over Jacky’s chest and gently pushed him behind me and stepped closer to the thing on the ground. Its ribs were exposed, shining white and pink, with bits of skin and meat hanging off. The grass all around the thing was black. On one side of the thing was a little fuzzball, but sticky and weighed down and red. On the other side of this white furry body was ears. The whole thing looked like a cotton ball drenched in blood.

This rabbit had no horns. It was snow white, like the kind you’d get at a pet store. The darkest thing about the rabbit was its intestines spilling out of its gut. 

—

When you’re quitting smoking, you feel it in your jaw. Your jaw feels like someone stuck a crank at the back and has been twisting the lines of muscle in your mouth tight. You chew gum, you break off pieces of those long, thin marshmallow sticks and use them as toothpicks.

Jo paced around the cabin with her phone in her hand, biting her knuckle. “Are you sure there’s not any wifi here?” 

“Last signal I got was on drive in, when we were still on a main road.” 

The cabin window looked out on the lake. The sunset and soft ripples on the water made the water look like a giant orange sequin blanket. Jacky threw rocks into the water, trying to skip. The closest he got to a skip was when a rock slid a little across the orange sequin blanket, before disappearing under.  

“Let’s do a campfire,” I said. “We’ve got weenies and S’mores.”

The cabin already had logs piled up on the side. I went out to Jacky and said, “Help me find sticks and things so we can make a fire.”

“Like one of these?” Jacky said, and he picked up a stick that still had green moss growing on the side. 

“No, that’s still too alive. You want old, dry, dead wood. Moss and living wood will smoke.”

Jacky laughed. “There’s no cigarettes out here. How will it do that?”

“Worse than cigarettes. It’ll make big clouds and it’ll get in our eyes and burn,” I said.

Jacky knelt down and started picking up little twigs. “Like when you drive and I sit in the back seat, and you have the windows open and your cigarette goes your window and then comes back in in mine?” 

“Yeah,” I said. “Like that.” 

The shadows from the trees reached over the lake like long black fingers.

—

That night after a couple of beers by the fire, I felt my jaw tighten again. I got up and said, “Nature calls.” That was the game we were playing, me and Jack. Every time you had to go take a leak, you declared, “Nature calls!” He thought it was so funny, he’d just start saying it, and then go pretend to pee even when he didn’t need to go. 

I went over by the car and popped open the passenger side. I reached under the passenger seat and felt around until my fingers touched something square. I withdrew a pack of Nat Sherman’s, still wrapped in plastic. I tore the packaging off with my teeth, peeled open the little gold foil folded over the butts. Nat Sherman’s is one of the few brands you don’t have to smack to pack the tobacco.

I went down by the lake, and a clear full moon shone in the water, and lit up. That tight crank feeling in my jaw loosened, and a warmness filled my chest. A woody, chestnut flavor filled my mouth, and I held that first drag in for as long as I could. Frog horns echoed over the lake with cricket song. The sound of Jo and Jacky laughing and talking behind me by the fire on the other side of the cabin.

“Nature calls!” Jacky said, followed by the sound of his feet tramping in the dirt. 

I was about halfway through the cigarette when a scream came. I dropped the cigarette and ran back to the fire. Jo was backing away from the fire, and Jacky on the other side was walking forward, holding a little bundle close to his chest. A pile of black sticks, or a bushel, all twisted. 

“Put that thing down! Drop it!” Jo said, sticking her finger out and pointing at the ground.

Jacky kept walking forward, and with each step he took, Jo took a step back. “I got one! Look Mom, I got one!”

Beneath that bundle of sticks I could make out a paw, and a sniffing nose. The bundle twisted in Jacky’s arms. The black barbs tensed, and Jacky shrieked, dropping it on the ground. Except when you drop a pile of sticks, they’re supposed to fly apart. This pile of sticks didn’t do that. There was a crack and a thump, but all the sticks stayed together. Jacky held up his wrist, tears streaming down his face, and two thin lines of blood ran down his arm. The black twisting mass of spikes jumped toward Jacky’s leg, and he leaped and kicked, sending the thing into the fire.

The black mass screeched, and already black smoke coughed out of the flames, smoke that smelled like black fur. A long brutal squeal, followed by the burning cluster of spikes rolling in the flames. It was a sound I heard on Youtube, a rabbit burning alive.

“It bitted me, Mom, it bitted me!” Jacky said. He held up his wrist, and blood pumped out in two thick streams. The cuts looked deep, the flesh dark beneath the skin. 

We brought Jacky into the cabin and I got the first aid kit from the back of the car. There were bandages and pain killers, lotion for bugbites. Jo held a compress over the bite, and I found a bottle of hydrogen peroxide. 

“Hold him for me,” I said to Jo. To Jacky, I said, “Okay Jackalope, this is going to sting.” 

Jacky tried pulling his arm back when I tilted the bottle over, but Jo held him still. The clear liquid dipped into the wounds and then back out, and bright white fizz filled his bite marks.

Jacky screamed with his eyes closed, his face pinched into a wet, sobbing X.

Jo looked at me. “You smell like smoke.”

“It was from the rabbit Jacky kicked into the fire,” I said. 

“No, it’s not. I smell it on your breath.”

I poured more hydrogen peroxide into the cut and Jacky screamed again. Between his screams was the sound of the bubbles, hissing and popping. When I looked close, it looked like something black was growing out of the bubbles, out of the bite marks. It looked like thorns. I blinked, they disappeared. 

“It’s okay sweety, we’re almost done,” Jo said. She grabbed some medical tape and wrapped the compress, soaked pink, around Jacky’s wounds.

That night, I dreamt of a Jackalope whose face was covered in thorns. It hopped up on my chest and I couldn’t move. It smelled like smoke. I couldn’t breathe, and it crept across my chest. The jackalope—it coughed, and a dribble of blood ran down its chin. It put its head down and pushed its horns into my throat. 

Colton Merris is the 1st place winner of the Chuck Palahniuk short story contest. His work has appeared in The Buckman Journal, The Coachella Review, The Clackamas Literary Review, and others, and is a guest editor on Dog Water Magazine. He lives in his hometown of Portland, Oregon. 

Substack: coltonmerris.substack.com

Instagram: @colton.merris