I was opening a can of soda when, by a bizarre series of accidents, I severed my left hand at the wrist. My liberated hand plopped down onto the counter with a kind of thud, and I was bleeding quite a lot.
The thing to do in those circumstances is to ball up a towel and clamp it under your armpit. This dramatically decreases the amount of blood going into your arm and out the end. Then, with this rudimentary tourniquet in place, you call an ambulance and do what they say.
I knew all that. But instead, I decided to watch and wait to see what would happen. I had a weird sort of a feeling that I would be okay. Maybe that was due to the blood loss. Who knows? The point is, I picked up my left hand in my right and sat down on the kitchen floor. My blood trickled and pooled around me.
After what seemed like a really long time, the flow of blood tapered off sharply, as if it had just finished dumping out of me. The puddle around me was substantial. There were a few drops coming from my arm, the last remnants of my blood. Then my internal organs started oozing down my arm and out the end. Which, believe me, felt really strange.
It took my organs as long as it had taken my blood to come out. At some point I began to wonder why I wasn’t dead, or at least why I wasn’t completely flipping out as my intestines slowly wormed their way out of my open-ended wrist. But everything seemed relatively okay, appearances to the contrary.
When all of my organs and blood lay on my kitchen floor, still I watched and waited. I didn’t know what else to do. After maybe twenty minutes, the whole mess began to shimmer and pulsate. The blood began to move, to join the organs in a gooey pile of biological material. Then there was a bright flash of light centered on the pile, accompanied by a sound like a ten-fingered major chord on a piano, only much freakier. The light faded an instant later, and there where my blood and organs had been was a pile of rabbits of varying breeds, colors, and sizes.
The rabbits untangled themselves from one another and began exploring my apartment, noses atwitch. Where my internals had been, there wasn’t even a stain. What’s more, my left hand was back at the end of my arm where it belonged. And I was really thirsty. My soda can was still on the counter. I got up and drank it.
So now I have seventeen rabbits, and I don’t weigh nearly as much as I used to. I have no idea what to do about all of this.
Ethan Abides 