120 Blind Dates... And Other Short Stories

Bugs

Bugs was a cute, fluffy rabbit who spent most of his time hiding from onlookers. He was not even three months old and had already been separated from his mother and siblings for several weeks with little hope that he would ever see them again. At least he had been able to gather that much from the other rabbits that had lived in the same cage in the past few weeks.

"You were raised by a professional breeder. Of course, he didn't care about your feelings and personality! If you had been a female with that shiny black fur, he might have kept you and used your uterus as a breeding machine. But believe me, you can still find a nice home. Just leave that hut and look irresistible when you spot a parent that doesn't look like one of those crazy ones," Dash, the oldest rabbit in the cage, had advised him. Dash was an albino and far less attractive than Bugs, which was probably the reason why nobody had bought him yet.

Every rabbit in his cage was afraid of the notorious "crazy ones": Parents who had a screw or two loose in their minds and treated their kids' pets like babies, dressing them up in clothes, putting them on leashes and nearly suffocating them to death by cuddling them.

Unfortunately, Bugs did not take Dash's advice and continued to hide in his hut until it was too late: On December 24, a man came into the pet store and asked the employee in charge of the rabbits if they had an "extra cute male rabbit" for his daughter. The man struck Bugs as the typical businessman, someone who was pretty cold and not the kind of owner you wanted to have as a pet.

The employee immediately thought of Bugs and raised the roof of his hut, catching him with her expert fingers at once. She then presented him to the owner and even touched his private parts to demonstrate that he was most certainly not a female and could not be pregnant already.

Bugs was unceremoniously put into a container, sold on a counter for 30 bucks and drove home with the man.

The little girl turned out to be beside herself with joy when she saw Bugs and heard that he was her Christmas gift.

"How shall we call him him, Leah?" the man asked and was apparently happy that his kid was happy.

"Bud," the girl said. Whether that was 'Bud' for 'buddy,' 'Budweiser' (the pet breeder's favourite beer) or 'butt' remained to be seen.

As it turned out, it never came to that.

Bugs pooped on the little girl's skirt just once when she had been playing with him for hours. He just couldn't help himself! But he made the girl cry, and her mother was upset, too. So on the next morning, December 27, Bugs was brought back to the pet store.

***
I thought I should share this story with you because it is based on the fate of my pet (not a rabbit though). Someone bought him as a Christmas gift for a kid who allegedly turned out to be allergic against him (even though it could also have been the other way around) and returned him to the pet store after Christmas.