Heart of Gold (Fantasy – 999 words)

I look across our cage as mother comforts my eleven siblings, all younger than me and all badly frightened. As they should be. We’ve all seen what happens when the ogres lift the doors to a particular family’s cage, inserting poles with choke collars and dragging us away one by one. We’ve all seen our fellow rabbits’ eyes grow wide with fear as they kick helplessly against the cage floor. It has been this way for as long as I’ve been alive, if you can call this kind of existence living. I’m reminded of stories told while huddled together, sharing the meager pellets that drop from the chute once a day. Stories of our ancestors hopping freely in dewy meadows, of digging holes and eating lettuces to one’s desires. All while viewing golden mountains in the distance, and the three large moons that control the tides of our world’s lone sea.

Communication between us captives is forbidden. Yet we find ways. A secret scratch here, a wiggle of the nose there. I’ve learned that the ogres captured my species down to the last rabbit many years ago. Not for food, but for drink—the liquor they make in the giant vats I’ve seen only once before in this distillery, when I became sick and was sent for treatment. You see, a rabbit’s heart is special. It contains many great things, as my mother taught me, but it also contains a hormone that gives the ogres exquisite intoxication. From what I can tell, it takes several dozen rabbits hearts to make each batch.

Since it will be our neighboring cage’s turn next, its occupants glance nervously at us. One of them, a female my age named Peep, told me yesterday that if things had been different, she would enjoy very much to hop along a mountain trail with me, and to share discovered edibles. She also told me that despite the fact her family’s turn would come soon, she did not want to feel fear when their cage door opened. She wanted to be brave, to look the ogre in its single eye and steel herself against the coldness of the choke collar, to expose her neck to it even, in a final display of defiance. That’s when it occurs to me—to try something to finally free us all from this wretched fate we face.

I would not have had an idea how to do it if I’d never become sick. But when I did, and had been sent for treatment some months ago, I’d passed through a giant room containing the vats that mix the potion the ogres greedily drink. I’d seen machines with wires and tubes snaking from them, with blinking lights and a series of switches that I witnessed an ogre pull at the exact moment I heard one of the cage doors open. I didn’t think much of my experience at the time, but after Peep confessed her thoughts to me, a plan seeded itself in my mind. I would have perhaps one chance in a thousand. But if I could somehow get out of this cage again, and at the same time as the distillery’s exterior door opened to allow the change of shifts, one chance would be better than sure doom.

My mother taught me many things—one of them being the sickness I’d had was the one great fear the ogres have regarding us rabbits. Should disease become widespread, we could all perish. To guard against this, the ogres quarantined us immediately once particular symptoms occur. My sickness had been minor, but it had mimicked a particularly virulent disease.

Seeing now an ogre walking in our direction, pole in hand, and detecting Peep’s nose twitch with sudden anxiety, I decide to act. I tell my mother I love her, brush whiskers with each of my siblings one at a time, then place chalk I scrape from the cage floor across my mouth. Flopping onto my back, I emit a high-pitched squeal and make erratic twitching motions with my hind legs. The ogre that approaches Peep’s cage pauses, its single, giant eye regarding me with sudden alarm. A offers a throaty warning to its cohorts, who in turn respond to my cage where they immediately extract me. They wheel me on a cart through the same room I’d passed through before, and at the exact moment I hear the heavy exterior door open, allowing the next shift of ogres to enter the distillery, I make my move. Hopping from the cart, I spring toward the switch that controls the cage doors. Avoiding an ogre’s swinging ax blade, I leap atop the master switch, pushing it down with all my might. I avoid another ax swing and glance through the open vat room doorway to see all the cage doors—twenty thousand of them in all—open. At once, a quarter million rabbits—Peep and her family, and mine too—make a desperate dash through the open exterior doorway toward freedom. But just as I witness that, the vat room door slams shut, a group of grinning, ax-wielding ogres standing between me and it. I have no way out.

I suspect my mother had warned me about the dangers of electricity while believing I would never be exposed to it. But here sits the master control panel with its myriad wires laid bare, the ogres apparently confident that no rabbit would ever think to fake sickness then jump into a shallow vat of liquid as I do now. And certainly, the ogres do not consider that rabbit—who himself has never seen the mountains, or hopped through a dewy meadow, or shared lettuces with a female—would now jump soaking wet into the panel itself, shorting it out and creating a fire that in just a few short minutes will burn the entire distillery to the ground, all while sacrificing the one life he has to give so that a quarter million should live.