At first I thought it was a piece of wadded-up tissue. Rick was always carrying them around, balled in his fist. When I changed his bed, I’d find shreds of them in the sheets, as if he’d been up all night, tearing them to bits—but this wasn’t a tissue. It was Slim’s front leg.

We both looked at it for a while. A tiny white thing on the grass. Then I thought of something. “Pick it up,” I said. Rick stared at the ground. “Do it,” I said. Rick took the front of his shirt and tried to put it over his head. “No,” I said. I pulled it back down. “No more hiding. Hiding is for babies. Now, I want you to pick that up and get rid of it. It’s time you learned to clean up after yourself. I’ll take care of the rest.”

I left him out there with Slim’s leg and went inside to pull those yellow gloves out from under the sink again. No bites for me! Then I went back outside. Rick had picked up the little piece of rabbit and was pressing the tip of his finger against the paw pads.

I took a towel off the clothesline and put the clothespins in my pocket. I walked over to the rabbit, scooped it all up, and brought it inside.

Slim had stopped moving. I put the towel down carefully in the sink and opened it up to take a look at him. I thought he might be dead, but as soon as I touched his shoulder, he started scrambling, clawing at me. I held him tight. He wasn’t going anywhere.

I scrounged some codeine out of the medicine cabinet, ground it up, and put it in Slim’s water. That helped. I held his glass feeder like it was a baby’s bottle. When he calmed down enough, I tied his little stump tight.

I went to look for a needle. I got some dental floss out of the medicine cabinet—mint. When I got back to the kitchen, Slim was out cold. I pulled the pieces of his skin together till they overlapped and clipped them with a clothespin from my pocket. I ran the end of a piece of floss through my lips to thread the needle—mint!—and tied the end in a knot. When I pushed the point through his skin, there was a tiny pop, and then it slid through nicely. I sewed up his side. I used a cross-stitch. I’m no seamstress, but it didn’t look bad.