I hadn’t expected the blood to spurt out the way it did. I returned home covered in it and had to explain to my dad what I’d done. Though I’d felt all right walking back from the rabbit’s tiny grave, a lump formed mysteriously in my throat when I had to justify my actions to someone else. I wiped away tears, unsure if I was embarrassed by my actions or my emotions. My dad laughed at me and tossed me a kitchen rag.

When I remembered the rabbit now, I was filled with a useless regret that I hadn’t cut off the muscle and eaten it. But a beer on an empty stomach had a wonderful effect—a combination of much-needed calories and alcohol working together to numb everything. I tried to keep myself from gulping.

The bar was new. Thin wood paneling ran up the wall from the tall backs of black-cushioned booths and curved around the ceiling, like the inside of a sailing ship. The man sitting next to me was a cop, his sturdy frame filling out the navy uniform.

“This place,” he said, raising a hand to gesture at the room.

“I know, right?” I replied, excited to have someone talking to me. It had been a long time since I’d been out with anyone. It’d been a long time since I’d been out at all.

“You live around here?”

“Yeah, pretty close.”

He nodded, ran a hand over his shaved head. “I used to work in this neighborhood in the nineties,” he said. “That’s where they put the new guys. We were on Franklin on my first week, on Franklin and St. Marks. We turned the corner and some guys had these girls tied to a lamppost on the street. These guys were chucking bowling balls at them. Fucking crack cocaine. They were playing ninepins with a group of screaming girls. Stopping traffic and no one even called us. We just walked in on that scene.”

“That wasn’t very long ago,” I said.

“And now you live here,” he replied. I felt he was stopping himself short of saying “little white girl.” It was what a strange man on my block had called me that morning, accompanied by a sucking sound against his teeth. Though I felt self-righteous about this sort of treatment—I was poor, what did he know?—I tried to understand that my face alone was a threatening sign of rising rent. He didn’t want me there, but I couldn’t afford to live anywhere else.