Quote:
Speaking of those rabbits! If you get bitten, for roughly two days after the bite, the injury is cold and the victim will feel random, cold, shooting pains. Their core body temperature will drop and they will often be sent into random fits of shivering. Eventually, these symptoms disappear--and so do the bunnies. Perhaps you, or someone you know, have the unfortunate luck of being attacked by one of these strange little bunnies. Good luck! No medicine seems to help, and no amounts of blankets or hot baths can soothe the chill. You're just going to have to deal with it and hope it gets better...
“Mummy, I’m cold,” said Kirra, when she got back from the park. Her bitten finger felt icy under her glove, and she shoved her hand beneath her jacket, tucked tight against her armpit.
Her mother gave her a ‘duh!’ look, brushing the snow off her hair for her. She was ushered in out of the hallway and into the lounge, where two heaters were going full-bore, electric humming drowning out the carols on TV. Her Mum helped her out of the jacket and brought her a blanket and a mug of hot chocolate. It even had a marshmallow. Kirra puffed on it, feeling the warm steam against her lips, but it didn’t seem to warm her up. A cold that was more than a shiver cut through her, from her hand all up her arm and down the other one, racing. The chocolate spilled, but she could barely even feel it. She set the mug down, half-drunk.
“Mummy, I’m cold.”
“Yep, America gets much colder than home, doesn’t it?” said her mother.
She ran a hot bath, filled up with bubbles, and gave Kirra a fluffy warm towel and warm pyjamas, just out of the dryer for when she’d finished, but it didn’t help. Her skin was pink from the water, but on the inside she was Elsa, and not in the fun way. Actually, she felt like Anna. She felt like ice.
“Mummy…” she said, and her voice was very small this time, because her teeth were clicking against each other, and it was hard to get the words out.
This time, her mother knelt down next to her, laying her palm against Kirra’s forehead. Then she frowned. Kirra frowned too, because a frowning Mummy was never a good sign.
“You kept your coat on while you were out playing, right? You kept your gloves on?”
“Ye-yes,” she whispered, her shoulders shaking. It wasn’t even a lie – Euporie had taken off the coat and gloves, and she wasn’t really Kirra when she was Euporie, because that was how Secret Identities worked. And anyway, she hadn’t really taken off any of her warm clothes. They just… went away? She figured the magic just took her normal clothes away, and gave them back when she was finished fighting monsters. Because it would be pretty silly if Superheroes had to carry around their normal clothes while they were in their hero costumes.
“Do I have a fever?” she asked miserably. “Am I gonna die?”
“You have the opposite of a fever. Let’s get you into something warmer.”
Her mother’s words were firm, but Kirra could still hear the edge of worry to them. She was bundled up in two pairs of pyjamas, and back into the coat and gloves, and then into the car, with a blanket tucked in all around her. It made her feel like she was a much younger kid than ten years old, but she was turning into ice forever and she couldn’t care about if people thought she was a baby. She hoped they were going to find the Trolls like in the movie, but in the end it was just the doctor.
The doctor talked a lot to Kirra’s mother, and looked at her hands, touching the bunny bite. Her hand felt numb.
The doctor frowned. Kirra’s mother frowned.
“Kirra-birdy, you know you’re not supposed to touch wild animals, right?” her mum said.
“Uh-huh,” said Kirra cautiously, hugging her arms around herself to keep the blanket close, not that it really helped.
“You didn’t touch any rabbits?”
Uh-oh, Kirra thought. She bit her lip, curling up smaller on the doctor’s chair. Mum and the doctor were staring at her, she could feel it like they had laser eyes. Another burst of cold shot through her, and tears welled in her eyes.
“But bunnies aren’t wild! Bunnies are bunnies!” she wailed. “And it was really fluffy. It wasn’t a snake or spiders or anything! It wasn’t dangerous!” Everyone knew all the dangerous animals lived in Australia. It should have been safe to play with the little white fluffball bunny. It wasn’t fair!
Tears streamed down her face in cold lines as the bite was bandaged and the doctor talked to her mum. There wasn’t any medicine, thank goodness, but she had to stay in bed for two whole days and miss out on playing in the snow and building snowmen. But her mother let her curl up on the couch with her, with blankets and pillows and hot soup, and they watched Frozen and her mum didn’t even complain when she sang along. Kirra fell asleep there, dreaming of puffy bunnies and princesses, until her fingers remembered how to be warm.
(784 words)
