After a lumpy night in the spare room, excommunicated again for breathing above the standard marital decibel level, I find Harrison’s left a sketch of a rabbit on a sheet of A4 on the hall floor. It’s characteristically detailed with shading and whiskers, with a speech bubble saying, ‘Your son’s kidnapped me. I’m in the kitchen.’

Butt-wedged in the corner between the back door and the washing machine is a white bunny with grey highlights. I don’t need to speak rabbit to know it’s saying, ‘Let me out of here!’ With her sniper-like put-downs and industrial-strength sulks, Orla’s clearly been thinking the same, that she’d be happier without me, would no longer need to nag me to start Saturday Parkruns or sort out ‘all the crap’ in the garage.

Except, neither of us could bear to lose our black Lab, Bonus, our current Head of Security. He’s whining from the conservatory, so I pop our guest in the downstairs loo. The dog ignores any essence de lapin as he skids through the kitchen into the garden, intent only on his wolf-size serving of turkey kibble, followed by a cursory sniff of the perimeter and a splashy piss against the birdbath.

I’m mid-bowl through my no-added-sugar, no-actual-taste muesli when a bleary-eyed Harrison comes down and explains that, after we’d gone to bed, he’d taken the car up to the old drovers’ road to play his guitar. Sometime after 2:00 am, he’d spotted the rabbit in the moonlight.

I pause, spoon poised. ‘Must be someone’s pet.’

‘Very good, Dad. You should have been a detective, not a dentist. It’s pretty tame. It’d scoot off into the cornfield but kept coming back.’

When he confesses it took him over an hour to nab it, I feel chest-swellingly proud of him. I tell him how my red-eyed white rabbit, Kuryakin, had arrived in the pannier of our neighbour’s throaty motorbike, rescued from who-knew-what hell in 1970s Southampton. I tell him about the much-loved pets at the orphanage in Tamil Nadu, where Orla and I volunteered one summer when we were students, called The House of Hope and Mercy.

Harrison retrieves the rabbit, holds it up, puts on a ventriloquist’s voice. ‘Nobody lives anywhere near the drovers’ road. I’ve been dumped.’

‘Don’t imagine we’re keeping it, not with you going to uni. Your mum won’t–’

Harrison pops the beast on the floor. ‘Let me talk to Mum, will you?’

I nip down the road for a couple of carrots from the community shop. When I get back, Orla has the rabbit on her lap, watching it chomp a leaf of Tesco’s Finest lettuce. She looks up, beaming. ‘This is one cheeky bunny. How quickly can you build a hutch? You’ve got enough bits of wood in the garage.’

‘What about Bonus?’ I say.

‘I’ve left him in the garden. They’re just going to have to learn to live with each other.’

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Chris Cottom lives near Macclesfield, UK. His work features in 100 Word Story, Bending Genres, Fictive Dream, FlashFlood, Flash Frontier, Gooseberry Pie, Leon Literary Review, MoonPark Review, NFFD NZ, Oyster River Pages, Roi Fain?ant, The Lascaux Review, and elsewhere. Find him at chriscottom.wixsite.com/chriscottom