Some people pace when they’re nervous.  Others can’t stop talking.  I, given the opportunity, tweeze.  My eyebrows, that is.  I don’t know if anyone else does it; it’s the one habit I have which makes me wonder if I’m compulsive.  I tweeze my eyebrows every morning no matter what kind of mood I’m in; but when I’m nervous I tweeze them again and again and again.

I fire my gun. People around me turn swiftly, some duck and take cover. No time to explain. Plastered on the building straight ahead is a movie poster. Your typical will-they-won’t-they edge-of-your-seat romantic comedy. A bullet hole in the male character’s washboard abs. I curse.

In the corner of my eye I see the man dashing across the street. My gun hand outstretched I run after him. Cars honk, people swear, but all I’m thinking of is the bright red shirt I mustn’t let out of sight.

The moon shone full into the window of stuntman Roger Tully’s movie set trailer. Roger steeped out of the small bathroom and directly into a pile of empty beer bottles. They clattered and then rolled across the floor. “Crap.” He smacking his lips together, wishing he had some water to drink, suspecting tomorrow’s hangover would be painful. Roger, reaching up to pull the blind closed mumbled, “Three months stuck in this hick Texas town, and we’re still not done shooting this movie.”

Ten of the rabbits are going to die, Dr. Burnham told me: and I’m going to kill them.

They stare up at me from small steel cages, wrinkling their noses and hopping in a way that might be nervous, as I prepare a syringe filled with a cancer-causing cocktail.

The solution is green, the color of radiation and toxic waste in comic books.

These ten rabbits have to die, or no one will accept the results of Dr. Burnham’s experiment, no matter how successful it is.

I was warned this day would come: you can’t be a PhD in biology here and not kill things.