[Context: read the previous part or start at the beginning. TW: bad amateur fiction!]
His office hour done, Gerald headed outside, mounted his bike, and started down the paved trail toward home.
As a rule, his 3.8-mile bike commute was uneventful. Today he felt more alert than usual, as if the unexpected office-hour encounters had opened his mind to the possibility of further surprises.
He had gone about a mile when a rabbit dashed across the trail from the left side to the right. It took Gerald a second to understand what had happened. The tufts of white fur in the spokes of his front wheel indicated that the rabbit must have gone straight through that wheel.
He stopped his bike and looked to the right. Amidst some bushes, the rabbit was cowering. Or maybe that’s just what rabbits looked like when not in motion.
Was it OK?
Gerald was tempted to approach it to see if it could demonstrate some continuing mobility, but he didn’t want to traumatize it further. He stared at it for a minute, then — convinced that he neither had killed it nor could help it — resumed his pedalling.
Had this been some sort of omen? He didn’t really believe in omens….
He thought of his biology students, most of whom seemed to be premed at one point or another. Probably amongst them were a couple of pre-veterinary students who someday would know exactly what to do for this rabbit. Gerald’s own thoughts were naive and silly: Put it on a treadmill? Draw some blood for testing?
Actually, he thought as he rode onward, you could check the bunny for BUN — blood urea nitrogen, an indicator of renal function. Probably useless in situations like this one, but still fun to say. Suddenly Gerald knew that his next exam would almost certainly include a highly contrived problem about a rabbit with kidney failure.
He was almost home. So, then, what was the takeaway from this ride? He had witnessed something improbable and jarring, and his usual patterns of thought had turned it into a bunny BUN pun. Was he missing the rabbit’s significance? (He paused to sing a line to the tune of “Little Drummer Boy”: Dooon’t dishonor him with bunny BUN puns….) Or was he giving it a significance entirely appropriate to his work as a teacher? Was the fact that he had noticed and reflected upon the rabbit a win in and of itself? Or was that setting the bar too low?
Or, since this was his life to live, could he set the bar wherever he damn well pleased?
[to be continued]
My Track Record 
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