The Hill That Didn’t End

The Rabbit does not always remember things in order.
Some memories arrive like they belong to someone else first, and only later decide to become his.
Year 7 is one of those.
Eleven years old. His first week at secondary school, barely moved up, still learning where the doors were.

The school sat at the top of a hill.
Sheffield is built on seven hills, like Rome, though nothing about it is Roman. No golden light, no ruins worth the name. Just grey, and industry, and a low, miserable sky. Not a place the Rabbit would ever have chosen to grow up, or to live. This hill had been given the steepest edge to keep.
It was steep in a way that didn’t feel real from the top. Fifty degrees, maybe fifty-five. Long grass, slick underfoot. Not a slope anyone would choose to walk down, even standing, even careful. The bottom was a long way down.
He had been walking around the back of the building, along the top of the slope, lost, trying to work out how to get to the cafeteria. Still new enough that the school was a map he hadn’t learned yet.
He was with a friend.

There were older boys.
Sixteen years old.
Five years, which at eleven is not five years but another species entirely.
Too loud.
Too certain.
Too far away to argue with.

There was nothing about the Rabbit that chose him. Wrong place, wrong time, that was all.
It could just as easily have been the friend beside him, and the fact that it wasn’t did not feel like being spared. Only like a coin that had already been flipped.

The Rabbit remembers being smaller than he thought he was at the time.
Not in height exactly, but in the way a body can feel unprotected, like it hasn’t yet learned what it is allowed to refuse.

The Rabbit remembers hands.
Not clearly at first, just the decision of them.
Being lifted, guided, held in a way that was not kindness and did not pretend to be.

One arm taken.
One leg taken.
Another.
Like the world briefly agreed he was not a person with balance anymore, just something that could be repositioned.

There was a rhyme they said while they held him.
And they swung him.
Back and forth, in time with the words, building the arc a little further each time.
He would learn later that other children got it on their birthdays: a silly thing, a swing between friends, a soft landing at the end.
A leg and a wing to see the king, a one, a two, a three.
But this was not a birthday.
And the counting did not feel like a game.
It felt like a countdown to the end.
Each swing gathering the momentum that would be used to throw him.

And then the hill.
The steepness he already knew, but seen now from its very edge, where the ground simply stopped. At that angle it might as well have been a sheer vertical face, a drop with no bottom he could find.

There was a moment (maybe a second, maybe less) where the Rabbit understood, with a strange clarity, that he was no longer in control of what would happen next.

Then the air.

That is what he remembers most.

Not the ground at first.
Not the landing.
But the air becoming longer than it should be.
Stretching time out until it stopped behaving like time at all.

Falling felt like being suspended inside something endless.
Like the world had opened a space between “this is happening” and “this is over,” and refused to close it.

The Rabbit thought, very simply: I am going to die.

Not in a dramatic voice.
In the quiet voice that children use when they believe thoughts are instructions from reality.

Then impact.
Head first.
By some miracle the neck did not snap. A different angle, a harder ground, and the story would have ended there, at eleven, at the bottom of a hill.
A sudden return.

Sound came back wrong.
The body came back before the meaning did.
The hill stayed there, unchanged, as if nothing had decided to matter.

Every one of the older boys was expelled from the school afterwards.
The Rabbit is not sure he understood, at the time, that this meant it had been real. That the adults had looked at it and agreed it was not nothing.

Later, people would say things like “you were lucky.”
And maybe that is true in the way adults mean it: bones unbroken, hospital not required, life continuing.

But the Rabbit remembers that luck is not what it felt like.
It felt like something that should have ended differently by any sensible rule.

He did not go back to school for a week.
And when he did, he never went near the hill again. Not once, in the five years that followed.
He would take the long way, the indoor way, any way that was not that edge of the grounds.
The body had decided, and it did not ask him first.
He could keep himself away from the hill in daylight. He could not keep it out of his sleep.

Afterwards, the memory did not stay in one piece.
It fractured into returns.

Sometimes it comes back as the air again: the falling part, the long impossible stretch.
Sometimes it comes back as the moment before, when the Rabbit is still being held and the world has not yet decided what it is going to do.
Sometimes it comes back as nothing at all until it suddenly isn’t nothing.

Flashbacks are like that.
They do not ask for permission.
They arrive as if the body is still there, still mid-air, still waiting for the ground to explain itself.

Sometimes it comes in dreams.
The falling again, and then he wakes.
It happens less than it used to now, maybe once every year or two.
There were years when it happened far more.
The body keeping its own calendar, returning to the hill on a schedule no one chose.

The Rabbit sometimes wonders what people mean when they ask when something “ended.”
Because in the body, some things do not end cleanly.
They just stop happening in the outside world and continue elsewhere.

Quietly.
Years later.
As a shape that still knows the hill.

The Rabbit does not try to find a single meaning in it anymore.
Only that the mind keeps returning, again and again, trying to translate what happened into something that can be safely stored.

But some memories refuse storage.
They stay in motion.
Like falling.