You Are a Jackalope Hunter
Your job is to coax jackalopes out of hiding.
Every day, you go to a forest near your home. There, you spend the daylight hours looking for signs of jackalopes in the hopes that you can catch one and bring it to your employers. You are paid a reasonable hourly wage to perform this task.
Jackalopes do not exist. There is irrefutable evidence that jackalopes do not exist. You know this. But it is your job, so you look for them anyway.
Your employer is a very big company. Its primary business does not involve jackalopes, but the executives have decided that their company needs to find one to increase profits. You don’t know how they came to that decision. You don’t know why your position exists.
You’ve never tried to explain the nonexistence of jackalopes to them. Your salary is good and your job security is better than anything else on the market. You don’t want to get fired, so you keep your mouth shut. You never bring up the fact that there’s no such thing as a jackalope.
Sometimes the company relocates you to a different forest in a different part of the country. They say it’s because there’s more jackalopes in the new forest. You allow yourself to be moved because it's your job. There are no jackalopes in the new forest. Jackalopes do not exist.
Very rarely, you find an odd-looking jackrabbit and bring it to your employers. They get very excited about it, even though it isn’t a jackalope. “This goes to show,” they say, “that when you find us a jackalope, it’s going to change everything.”
You don’t have many friends. Spending all day in forests looking for animals that don’t exist takes a toll on your social life. You don’t stay in one place long enough to really get to know anyone. You don’t see your family much either, but they’re proud of you, even though they don’t exactly understand what it is you do. Look how successful you are. Look how much money you make. “There goes our kid,” your parents say.
You have been working this job for a couple years now. Your employers are starting to get angry. They don’t understand why you haven’t been able to find them a jackalope yet. You wonder if now is the time to break the news to them, to tell them that jackalopes don’t exist. But you know deep down that time will never come. You keep your mouth shut. You keep working.
Look, in the clearing there: a jackrabbit. It’s got a lump on its head; maybe this will tide your bosses over. Slowly you creep toward it, your arms outstretched, ready to snatch it. Suddenly, the jackrabbit notices you; it freezes, then it bounds away. You try to chase it, but it’s faster than you, much faster. You stop to catch your breath and watch it as it hops, farther and farther away, until it goes behind a cluster of trees and vanishes from your sight forever.
An early version of this story was published on the website Cohost, which is now sadly defunct. For more like this, subscribe to my RSS Feed. Send comments and jackalope location leads here.