There’s a rabbit, not Peter, who visits my vegetable patch, a gangland garden of my clan that pays a lease to the Earth. And I should refuse the rabbit, not Peter, my hard-grown cabbages. A stomping, swearing, shooting Mafioso of the poor clay soil my role, locked in debt like a crazy gambling Cortez, driven to exterminate— but what is a spoiled cabbage or two, that can be saved for eating by the chop of a knife: coleslaw for the dinner table; a dewy morning feed for the rabbit, not Peter. And it’s that way that I sometimes have the heart to refuse.