By Amelia Díaz Ettinger

Inspired by Gabriel García Marquez, Un Señor Muy Viejo Con Alas Enormes

Maybe it was true, the land had turned angry against the rabbits that were eating all the carrots on the planet. Maybe that was why, on the least important day of the week, on a long line of unimportant days, while the rabbits ate the carrot, the thin part of the root, where all the taste collected, wasting the green tops and most of the fleshy part, the soil began to liquify. 

During those days, before the earth decided to get rid of the annoying rabbits, there were a few, and by some accounts, only one, but most were certain there were at least three coyotes in those parts. Squalid creatures with ribs so prominent the wind played songs in them as if they were harps. They were the last of the predators left.  

The coyotes, with their languid countenance, lacked the energy to lick their own dirty coats, let alone try to chase and kill the abundant rabbits. Rabbits who had grown so accustomed to the lethargy of the coyotes that they laughed at them, mocking them in shrill, loud calls. Their taunts were akin to a child screaming, “Come and get me.” The coyotes never did, and not by deafness, but they seemed incapable of knowing where to turn or what to do. Their numbers dwindled, and the music from their rib cages grew louder and louder.

This all took place until the Earth’s soil thought She had had enough. Turning herself into a liquid mud that smelled of rotting meat, the rabbits began to dwindle too. What have we done? Their nervous eyes began to question as they turned into large, bulging orbits in their head as they looked frantically around themselves and found no comfort. There was no place to stand as they scampered on top of their once-abundant carrots. Their soft bodies were trapped, drowned in the excrement like soil. They screeched agonizing screams for help, swearing they could do better as they held on to their precious carrots. They convulsed and scampered on top of each other, making a hideous spectacle with their twisted, decomposing bodies, without avail.

When the earth realized that She had gotten rid of those uncaring rabbits, She began to grow strong again—little by little, She regained her sensual texture and aroma of fertility. The carrots again grew plenty. The green tops hid and twisted among the bones of the abundant rabbit carcasses that lay strewn in the open fields for many centuries to come. They stayed there in the landscape as gruesome mummified reminders of the time when the land grew sad on an unimportant day in a line of unimportant days

The balance She was hoping to regain finally came. And the coyotes grew fat and danced and howled under the light of the full moon and avoided the fossilized corpses of an enemy they no longer remembered.

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Amelia Díaz Ettinger is a Latinx BIPOC poet and writer. Amelia’s poetry and short stories have been published in anthologies, literary magazines, and periodicals. She has an MS in Biology and MFA in creative writing. Her literary work is a marriage of science and her experience as an immigrant. Presently, she resides in Eastern Oregon.