That’s All, Folks!
T. Abeyta

My pet rabbit is always looking for new ways to kill me. She’s wedged into a three-inch gap between the stove and counter in order to do a three-point turn then chew up the gas lines behind the oven. I see her backing up like a little truck as I drag an IV pole into the bathroom with me.

When I come out, she has Houdini’d herself behind the oven. I say to my nurse, Hey, come see where Betty is—I’m going to move the oven and she’ll come running out. My nurse is at the kitchen table, logging my chart, but she gets up and pads over in her black socks. I shake the oven and Betty bolts from the side, folded up like a taco, scrambling eggs with her rabbit feet on the linoleum.

My nurse laughs and laughs as I stuff Trader Joe’s bags into the gaps on either side of the oven. Then I start itching.

I go back to the kitchen table where I work and my nurse works while I get a five-hour drip of white blood cell plasma, most likely harvested from crackheads in the Phoenix area.

When they finally diagnosed me with a rare disease fifteen years ago, there were plasma shortages all the time. The opioid epidemic solved all that. At about a hundred dollars a pop, my plasma comes from people feening for fentanyl, people with a death wish like my bunny. People who watch blood move through tubes while thinking about spoons.

I wish I could tell them thank you for throwing your health away. It’s because of you that I get to live a semi-normal life where my biggest fear is that my rabbit will cut the gas line.

Almost everyone in my family is addicted to one thing or another. When my dad died, he was addicted to exercise. My mom loved Hershey Kisses and spending borrowed money. My brother smoked heroin with Justin who was nineteen with four kids. My mom’s Italian mom: Neapolitan ice cream and control.

When I start itching, I think I’m just getting fat, like my skin can’t take a recent Ahn’s burger run. I tell my nurse and she says change my sweats, they must be rubbing on my hips. By hips, she means fat. I drag my IV pole to the bedroom and see Betty wrestling to pull out one of the paper bags and I have faith in her.

I don’t feel like I’m fatter, but I hardly ever wear sweats, only during these infusions because the medication runs through my veins like a toboggan carrying ice. When I take them off, my skin is flaming red around the waistband. I figure my body is trying to tell me to quit the pineapple milkshakes and fries. I ignore an impending death threat because of my training as a woman. I put on the loose Old Navy bottoms I wear when no one is looking, which is every night now that my relationship of three years is over. My only regular contact with something alive is with a two-and-a-half-pound rabbit whose doll bed she shares with her one and only: a matted-up stuffed otter.

“Everything is always trying to kill you in Texas,” says the Texan who killed me off in his mind like changing a TV channel. When we broke up, I said to him “You will forget me in one week” then blocked him on my phone. The Internet says it takes eleven weeks to get over a relationship and I think about that song “All My Ex’s Live in Texas.” The first time he broke up with me, I threw his cowboy hat on the floor when he was packing. He was quaking in his boots the second that hat hit the rug. The rabbit hopped over, somewhat impressed. “Never throw a man’s hat on the floor,” he once said, but I had already researched cowboys and retorted “I thought a hat couldn’t go on the bed.” I lifted the window and stuck my head out as he was throwing clothes in his trunk: “Don’t forget your bread maker,” I said in a panic.

I shuffle back to working at the kitchen table with my nurse who is sitting on the other end. As I type away at e-mails, she asks me questions like rate my ability to complete tasks. I might look like I’m completing tasks, but when no one is there to witness me, why do I feel like a tree falling in the forest? These questions are designed so that a patient learns to lie to get through them. Rate your ability to go to the bathroom. Rate your ability to imagine the future without the person you thought was your soulmate, so you gave him a million chances.

As I’m typing away, I secretly scratch my underboob. My scalp. I don’t want to be gross so I am crafty about it. I hide it so well that I trick myself into believing that I’m not drowning in itches as I turn into an octopus. I take breaks in between so I’m not obvious. My nurse is telling me she wants to break up with her boyfriend and move back to Iran. She saw his messages to a fitness model on Instagram. They have been together for fourteen years and now he has decided he wants to have a baby, but she is fifty-two. I’m listening and trying not to scratch my armpits because that’s just too much. Finally, I say I have to go to the bathroom again.

As I pass the kitchen, I see that Betty has ripped out the paper bag from one side of the oven, but I can’t take it anymore—I need to scratch myself silly. I lift the claw of my IV pole over the radiator valve in the bathroom, shut the door and pull my shirt up. I have raised welts covering my entire back, under my boobs, and on the back of my neck. I’m a relief map where it’s all red rock elevation. I’m Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico. I am my native lands finally expressed on my body, before the milk of Europe poured in.

I am watching myself in a toothpaste-speckled mirror become pre-colonial. My lips puff even bigger than when the kids at school called me bongo lips. My pupils bloom over their irises. I hunch over the sink and watch the geography of it all take shape and it’s beautiful. I want to see who I really am, so I watch what happens as the invaders infiltrate me. My skin rises into higher peaks and valleys as I fight the crackheads in Phoenix, the opioid epidemic, rising costs of living. I turn into the people in the black-and-white photographs inside my grandmother’s family tree book she titled Here’s Annie! I think of the cartoons of my childhood, good guy against bad guy, Tom and Jerry, the Roadrunner and Coyote, and I am both sides fighting myself just like I have for so long: white guys or brown guys, UC Berkeley or a public library card, the Cannon or Iceberg Slim, NPR or the neighborhood news as told by Ahmed who runs the corner store. Two worlds, cowboys and Indians, and then there is an arrow in my throat.

I am choking. I cannot breathe. I burst through the door, dragging the pole—my lifeline turned deathline—over to the kitchen counter where I put my hands down on the cool tile and say, for the first time in my life, Help me. My nurse is a tiny blur, black ponytail whipping, as she fumbles for the anaphylaxis kit. And that’s when I turn and see Betty, smushed between the oven and the wall, her little feet moving, but her body static. Her on her treadmill to death, me closer to the truth.

Because here’s what I think about. The Texan and how he said, right before we broke up, that he’s been looking at gold wedding bands and did I know that the ones Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes wore were up for sale? I think about how you don’t have to major in English to know the jokes about the oven. But he will never know the stupid comments men made when I said, at twenty-one, that she was my favorite poet. Ovens equated to a hot bedroom. He will never know how disappointed I was when we all cut bangs and went to the first showing of the Gwyneth Paltrow movie to watch Plath seal her fate as a crazy woman instead of one of the best poets in the world just because of her final moments. In this kitchen full of women, Betty the bunny is the most sophisticated out of all of us. All day she has been desperately trying to show how we keep gassing ourselves up with the same thing that extinguishes us.

T. Abeyta is a third grade dropout who didn’t get a GED but did snag two Master’s degrees. She teaches literature and lives in Oakland with a free-roaming lionhead rabbit named Betty.