The Skeptical Rabbit

7 min readApr 26, 2021

I was six years old when the rabbit appeared during one of my extended sleepovers at Chicago’s Children’s Memorial Hospital. A lit cigarette dangled from the corner of the brownish bunny mouth.

I wasn’t all that surprised. Magic had been woven into my brain since the earliest moments of my budding consciousness. Santa, the Tooth Fairy, Big Bird and Sunday Mass made a smoking rabbit look tame by comparison.

“You do know Big Bird is a puppet, don’t you?” the rabbit asked, which let me know that he could read my mind — also nothing new, since I’d been told that God did that on a regular basis to detect any “impure thoughts,” whatever that meant. Father O’Malley’s sermons hinted that it had something to do with girls, but exactly what was unclear. Why were priests always so vague?

I was glad the rabbit hadn’t showed up in my bedroom at home, since I shared that with my annoying year-younger sister, and she would have made a fuss over him smoking. Little Debbie would always start coughing when Mom lit a cigarette, since she’d heard that smoking caused people to die and all. Mom would look all ashamed when Debbie started one of her fake coughing fits, since she’d been unable to quit cold-turkey like Dad. I thought it was really bratty of my sister to pull that guilt trip on Mom like that.

Now that I think about it, it wasn’t my sister that would start coughing to try and guilt Mom into quitting smoking — it was me. But what other choice did I have? I didn’t want Mom to go dying on me. Who would bring me books on drawing in the hospital is she died?

The point is that my little sister is really annoying.

I decided to set the rabbit straight on reality. “Big Bird is not a puppet.”

The rabbit blew a smoke ring. His left ear drooped a bit lower. His sneer deepened. “Suit yourself kid. If you want to live your life wallowing in fantasy, be my guest.”

“Are you the Easter Bunny?” I asked.

The rabbit rolled his eyes, then pointed a furry paw at the two casts on both of my legs. “You a war hero or something?”

“I wish. My feet came out backwards when I was born. Doctor Tazjen claims he can fix them after a few more years of breaking bones and stretching tendons and expensive torture shoes.”

The rabbit glanced at my sketchbook. It was lying open at a drawing that was supposed to be the Apollo Lunar Lander, though one of the nurses had complimented me on my nice drawing of a coffee maker.

The rabbit said, “You don’t actually believe all that nonsense about landing on the moon, do you?”

I was glad he’d made the lunar connection from my drawing, but since he could read minds, it didn’t really count. “Why wouldn’t I believe it?”

“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,” the rabbit said cryptically.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You ever actually met anyone who landed on the moon?”

“Three Apollo astronauts visited the hospital last week. They even posed with a bunch of us kids for WGN News.”

The rabbit blew smoke out his cute pink nostrils like a cute pink dragon. “Propaganda is all that is.”

“The landings were on television.”

“I guess you think Flash Gordon is real too?”

“Everyone knows Flash Gordon is based on a comic book.”

“The comic books might have been based on a real Flash Gordon just like the Batman comics are based on a real psycho millionaire.”

“I never thought of that! Do you think Flash Gordon actually — ”

“My point is,” the rabbit said, his whiskers twitching, “neither our perceptions nor our beliefs can tell us whether something is true or false.”

I had to think about that for a few moments to untangle it. “You’re saying that because our senses can be fooled, we can’t know what’s real? Like, all of this might be a dream or something?”

“Reality is relative to our ability to perceive it, and humans have a terrible track-record at perceiving reality.”

“By that logic, you can’t know Big Bird is a fake, right?”

“Big Bird is definitely a puppet.”

The rabbit was clearly incapable of having a rational, evidence-based discussion about his irrational Big Bird puppet conspiracy theory, so I changed the subject. “Do you have a name?”

“My name is Timon, but my friends call me Tim. I don’t actually have any friends, but I’ve always imagined that, if I did have friends, they’d call me Tim.”

He looked a bit sad, so I said, “Well, Tim, I don’t have many friends either, since I spend most of my time drawing and reading in hospitals or at home on crutches.” Which wasn’t exactly true, since I was halfway through the first grade at Saint Celestine’s, but I thought emphasizing my own social isolation might cheer him up.

The rabbit motioned at another patient lying in the bed next to mine. “What’s his deal?”

I lowered my voice. “That’s Marcus. He’s got cancer.”

At the sound of his name, Marcus turned over and looked at me with bloodshot eyes. “Who are you talking to?”

The boy’s head was completely bald. The deeply etched contours of the muscles and bones of his face resembled a DaVinci anatomical diagram. Dark circles ringed his eyes, making him look a lot older than his nine years of existence.

“I’m sorry I woke you, Marcus,” I said.

“It’s okay, I don’t sleep much anymore.”

It became evident that Marcus couldn’t see the rabbit, which I attributed to his condition. When I described what Tim looked like, Marcus said, “He really shouldn’t be smoking, since it causes cancer.”

“You don’t think the moon landings were faked, do you?” I asked Marcus.

“Of course they weren’t faked,” Marcus said.

“And Big Bird is definitely a bird, and definitely not a puppet, right?”

“Um . . . actually — “

“Ask him if he’s afraid of dying,” the rabbit said.

“I’m not asking him that,” I said to the rude rabbit.

“Ask me what?” Marcus asked.

“Tim wants me to ask you if you’re afraid of dying, but you don’t have to answer if you don’t want to.”

“I don’t mind answering. Zeno says that death is part of the natural order of the universe, so I’m not afraid.” He hesitated, then added, “I am afraid of how my Mom and Dad will take it.”

Though I had no idea who Zeno was, Father O’Malley had told me that cancer and things like my deformed feet were all part of God’s divine plan. A “test of faith,” he called it. In that moment, I felt lucky that God hadn’t tested me the way He was testing Marcus. I was pretty sure I would have failed that test.

Using me as the go-between, Marcus and Timon had a long philosophical discussion that went on for most of the night. It was like listing to my Dad and my Uncle Norman discuss politics, baseball, or some other impenetrable nonsense that didn’t do anyone any good — especially when people placed bets on it and lost a lot of money and couldn’t afford car payments and had their car’s repoed.

The next morning, my parents brought me home. When I returned some weeks later to get my casts removed, I asked which room Marcus was in so I could say hi to him. The nurse said, “Marcus is no longer a patient here.”

“Is he better?”

She forced a smile. “Much better, indeed,” she assured me. “Marcus is in Heaven.”

I tried feeling happy for Marcus for making it to Heaven early.

I wondered what point God was making by putting Marcus through all that suffering if he would just end up in Heaven either way?

Jerry Bianchi (whose father was a fireman) once used a magnifying glass to burn ants in the parking lot during lunch recess. He got this creepy grin on his face as he made them thrash around before dying. Most of the kids watched in fascination, though a few girls covered their eyes. I could imagine Zeus doing that to humans with his lightning bolts, and maybe even God doing it to sinners in Hell to punish them for impure thoughts, but I couldn’t imagine Jesus standing by and letting innocent ants and a good kid like Marcus suffer for no good reason.

When Mrs. Petticone found out about the senseless ant-killing, she took away Jerry’s torture device and gave him detention. Unfortunately, she also praised me in front of the class for my moral action of ratting Jerry out to alleviate the ant-suffering. Jerry promised to beat me up as soon as I got my casts off.

One thing I should mention. Each time I go to the hospital for an operation, I feel sorry for myself — and each time I leave the hospital, I feel incredibly lucky in comparison to kids like Marcus. Which meant that seeing Marcus suffer horribly made me feel better about my lesser amount of suffering.

When I later found out that Jerry’s father was a drunk and beat him on a regular basis, I thought about those ants. Did torturing ants and beating up other kids make Jerry’s suffering more bearable in a similar way that seeing Marcus suffer made my suffering more bearable?

Which brought up an even stranger thought. Was God giving kids like Marcus cancer so that kids like me appreciated the life He’d given us?

I suppose Tim was right. Reality is pretty darn relative and pretty darned twisted.