The Curious Incident of the Bloody Rabbit

Weeks ago, I was tanning.
I admit it.
Tanning.

I don't like paying people to paint me orange, but sitting outside on a nice day, soaking in some rays, reading a book and gettin' myself right for the summer seemed innocent enough.

I must have been wrong.

The sun makes me sleepy. So do cars and airplanes and The Neville Brothers. But the sun was the only culprit in play on this day. So I fell asleep; something you shouldn't do, by the way.

I don't know exactly how long I slept, but it was long enough for me to dream of Gremlins and being toothless and running in place and falling very quickly. I don't know much about dream interpretations, but if you do, then I must have just told you a lot about myself unbeknownst to me.
When I woke up, I was in pain.
It was immediate and violent and angry. It burned.
It screamed at me.
I remained unmoved and my skin was berating me.
There were beads of sweat squating on multiple points of my stomach. They had nowhere to go, the skin had been burned tight around my muscle and bone.
I was red, like the blood was desperately trying to get past my skin cells.
Red.
I saw red. Felt it. Burned red.
In a minute, there would be sharp pain every time I moved.
In a day, there would be blisters.
In a week, white strips of dead skin will peel off me like a rattlesnake hide.
Red.
Blood. It was on my hands.

This sunburn was so bad it made my hands look covered in blood.

I wanted to get a closer look. I would have to bite the bullet, I would have to move my body. I would have to take a deep breath before I dared move my body.
Deep breath. Movement. White hot blinding pain.
I was sitting up and my hands were closer to my face now.
It was blood. Real blood. Holy cow, the sun burnt my body so bad, my vessels popped!
The sun exploded my body. I'm dying. I'm exploding from the inside out and I'm dying.
For some reason, at this point, the Beatles' Here Comes the Sun popped into my head. It was not comforting.
Not both of my hands were bloody, just one of them. The sun must have been hotter on one side of my body than the other.
I am not a scientist. I'm not even good at math, but this sounded like a good on-the-spot hypothesis.

The blood on my hand was streaky; smeared. I wanted to touch it.
I have a history of wanting to touch things that I probably shouldn't. Same thing with tasting. I often taste things I probably shouldn't. I've eaten sand, and live earthworms and toy slime that came in a little plastic container, and Play-Doh and many, many U.S. coins.
So anyway, I wanted to touch my hand-blood. So I did. I may be exploding internally, but this is still a free country and if I want to poke at my bursting appendages, I can.
So I did.
It was blood. It was not my blood...

...One problem solved, one new problem arose.

I used to sleepwalk when I was little. No one has yet confirmed that I ever ended this trend and therefore I am suddenly convinced that as I was shirtless in the park, I fell asleep, began sleepwalking and killed someone.
Or maybe I killed a dog. Or a squirrel. A squirrel would better explain why I hadn't been hassled yet. Someone would surely notice if I had killed a person or a dog in the middle of a park and that someone would surely raise a stink about it.

I gritted my teeth and forced my burned body to stand. It hurt, but not as bad as before. The adrenaline of suddenly becoming a murderer had already made me tougher; able to withstand more pain. I'm ready for Attica.
Sing-Sing.
Folsom.
The Angola Farm.
Chino.
Bring it, maggots. I kill in my sleep (apparently).

Then, I see it. Off to my right. It's not a squirrel.
It's not a squirrel, but it is bloody. Not covered in blood, but oozing; as if it were bludgeoned in the head a lot.
A lot.
It was a rabbit. It was gray. Gray and red from the blood.

The Beatles left my thoughts and Jefferson Airplane entered. But this rabbit was gray, not white, so the next thing in my head was the Bible.
This is a bad omen. Wasn't this the loss of innocence?
Wait. That was a lamb.
The end of humanity?
No. No, that's four horses. Or one pale horse? I can't remember. What was the significance of a rabbit?
Not to cheat on your wife and ignore your mistress?
No. No that was Michael Douglas in 'Fatal Attraction'.
Christ, why did I kill this rabbit? I like rabbits.

Am I positive I killed the rabbit in my sleep? Surely, there is a more logical interpretation of the facts in front of me. I continued looking around for other clues. Where was the mob gathering around me, angered that I murdered a rabbit? What if the blood on my hands was not the rabbit's blood and all of this was a strange coincidence? And if this was all a strange coincidence, would I be happy about it or even more upset?

My keys. When I stood up, my keys fell off my stomach.* I fell asleep with my keys on my stomach and they were still there when I woke up. What were the odds that I got up while sleepwalking, murdered an innocent forest creature, lied back down in the exact same spot in the park that I started from and replaced my keys on my stomach?

Okay, so I must not have killed the rabbit, or if I killed the rabbit, I must not have moved at all while I did it. No, I was willing to bet I was not this rabbit's murderer.
Now remember, much of this stuff may be obvious to you, but I had been lying out in the sun for hours - I was sunslowed. I was sleepy and grogy and sunslowed, so things didn't come quickly for me at that point.

The sun hadn't exploded my skin. I hadn't unconciously commited homicide or.. uh, pesticide or whatever one calls murdering an animal. Is it possible the sun unconciously comitted pesticide and exploded this bunny with it's intense heat?
But the blood on my hands. What's that about?
Wait, maybe the bunny was exploding and hopped over to me in hopes of being saved? **
My assumption is that the bunny was alive and bloody when it crossed my path, maybe rubbed up against my hand, and I was too sun-drunk to wake up and notice.

The moral of this wacky tale? Beats me. Life gives you some weird things to deal with sometimes.
How's that for an ending?

====================

* So, if you're keeping track of the story details, yes, I had an outline of my keys on my stomach. I already told you I had not planned on falling asleep long enough to brand the outline of my keys onto my stomach.

** Boy was that rabbit off if it thought I had the ability to save it from bursting in the heat. Stupid rabbit.