the wheel
a rabbit runs on an infinite hamster wheel and is told by the Wolf if she stops running the sky will fall. she runs and she runs until her ankles twist and snap. she runs and she runs despite the pain of her own bones tearing through her flesh. if she stopped the fragile jigsaw puzzle of the sky would crumble and the deaths of everyone she loves would crush her and kill her first.
she knows that the Wolf is known to lie but his words are confusing and it’s hard to tell what’s sugar and what’s aspartame and she cannot risk killing her loved ones. she doesn’t speak to the Wolf anymore and neither does her mother who used to run alongside her. she is too big for the hamster wheel now and maybe the Wolf only ever saw her as something small and moldable and something that could never outgrow the wheel or his stench. she has seen others manage to outrun their Wolves while others seem to have never known what terrible things a Wolf can do to a rabbit. they know somehow that the sky won’t fall and somewhere inside her the rabbit does too, yet the scars the Wolf left her are too deep for her to remember anything else.
she has to keep running or the sky will fall. it must be so fragile to be held up by one nothing little rabbit. everything is up to her everything is her fault if things work out it’s a mistake if they don’t it’s to be expected her bleeding paws are a sign of her strength and sensitivity so it must be a good thing to keep running right? even if her lover is begging her to step off of the hamster wheel she was never made for deep down they must believe she deserves to keep running right? they tell her it’s safe and the ground is soft and even but how could she believe them when the Wolf would tell her that as well only to bite at her small broken limbs? they couldn’t know better than she could and besides what if she stopped running and the Wolf was telling the truth and it was the rabbit all along that was the problem and everyone she ever loved was crushed under the weight of the sky?