By Elizabeth Chivers

When I was just about ten, still in grade school and still not quite conscious of my own personhood, my family got meat bunnies. My mom had told my dad it would be the final straw, and she was, classically, correct. By then, we already had a cat, Emily Dickenson, that I’d begged for for years, a beautiful, gentle lab named Millie, a small run of chickens, a pen of white turkeys, and, significantly, two little pet bunnies. Not meat bunnies.

By Elizabeth Chivers

The smell precedes it; wafting up the stairs at ten in the morning. Like a zombie, you rise from bed, still not quite awake. You know it before you see it. Pancakes.