Goddamn Jackrabbits

This semester I teach four stories: Joy Williams’ Taking Care; Mark Richard’s Strays; Sherman Alexie’s This Is What It Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona; and Denis Johnson’s Emergency.

What do these stories have in common (aside from how much I love them)?

Except for Strays, there is a scene in each story, in which two characters are riding together in a car and either witness or cause the death of a rabbit. (In Strays, there is "an exploded chicken in the grill of Uncle Trash’s car." Similar, yet so very different.)

How does the same fundamental scene appear in three different stories? In Taking Care, Jones is driving along with his granddaughter strapped into her carseat next to him. He sees a hare running through the snow. The next thing that happens, a hunter shoots the hare, which tumbles to a dead flop in the road. In Phoenix, Arizona, Thomas Builds-the-Fire takes over driving from Victor in the middle of the Nevada desert. Immediately, a long-eared jackrabbit dashes out in front of the pickup, and Thomas runs over it. The rabbit is "first living thing" they see in all of Nevada, and Thomas kills it. They are quick to tell each other that the jackrabbit’s death must have been suicide. In Emergency, Georgie the Orderly is driving along with the narrator, Fuckhead, sitting beside him. Georgie hit a rabbit. They didn’t notice right away. Georgie stopped, then "threw the truck in reverse" and "zigzagged back to rabbit, almost running over the poor animal a second time." We all know what Georgie did to the rabbit next.

So, what’s with the common scene? Why does it repeat itself in three different stories? Taking Care was published first, in the 1970s. Emergency second, though much later, in 1992. This Is What it Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona third, in 1993. This is a baffling sort of mystery, the running over of rabbits with vehicles in contemporary fiction. I have no explanation for this phenomenon. But I am curious to find other examples of the same scene.