Building Chicken Coops

Will you read my short story and tell me what you think?

Please be honest. If you like it, say so. If you don't, tell me why. It's as simple as that. Thanks in advance for your critiques and comments. =D

Mr. Cottontail’s Chicken Run

There were three days until Sunday.

Peter glared at the calendar as if it had committed some horrible, unspeakable crime. Just three days. He slouched over and groaned, pulling his ears down over his eyes.

Okay, so maybe putting Easter off to the last minute hadn’t been such a great idea after all. But, hey. He was only one rabbit. Did people really expect him to carry on, year after year, popping out eggs like a tennis ball machine? Well, of course they did! They took him for granted. Laying eggs was tough. Real tough. Most people just didn’t get that.

People didn’t expect the Pumpkin King to do everything by himself, did they? Oh, no. The guy had ghouls and witches and various other creatures of the night to help him scare the pants off people every Halloween.

And Cupid? Cupid had his handy-dandy love pixies that went around every Valentine’s Day, shooting people with toxic love arrows left and right.

Santa probably had it the easiest, what with all those elves to do his dirty work. He was just the delivery boy, really, and as a reward for all the hard labor he didn’t do, he got to taste delicious desserts all around the world. And what did the elves get? Nothing, by the looks of the Big Guy’s stomach. Jolly Ol’ Saint Nick practically treated those elves like dirt. Worse than dirt, actually. He treated them like—

Slaves. Peter sat up suddenly, something like a smile crossing over his furry face. Of course! Why hadn’t he thought of it before? It was a brilliant idea. Genius, really.

But…no. Peter frowned. No, he wasn’t that kind of rabbit. Was he?
One more glance at the calendar told him, very clearly, that, yes. Yes, he was that kind of rabbit. He started to scramble around his rabbit den for supplies.

Two minutes later, he was standing at the mouth of his burrow, an empty sack thrown over his shoulder and a bunny pack, bulging with corn and several containers of Sandman’s All Natural Sleeping Dust, snapped securely around his waist.

Peter took a deep breath and hopped down the hill, towards Tom’s poultry farm, nervous but more determined than he’d ever been before. He was a hare on a mission. He was ready for anything.

When he finally reached his destination, Peter didn’t waste any time setting up his trap. After a few quick glances around to make sure nobody was looking, he set to work. Using his paws, he dug a hole, about as deep as he was high, near the opening of the chicken coop.

After he’d finished, he disguised the gap in the earth as best he could by carefully setting down a layer of very leafy tree branches. He made sure the branches were just barely long enough to cover the hole without actually falling in.

To camouflage the hole even more, he added another level of fallen leaves and clumps of grass. And, since he couldn’t leave any sort of evidence to give away his trap, he used his feet to pack down the dirt left over from digging the hole until it was a small mound on the ground.

Finally, he set a pawful of corn from his pack on top of the trap and, with somewhat more enthusiasm than was necessary, dumped half a can of sleeping powder over the bait. Yeah, Peter thought, that should be enough.

He ran back to the borders of the farm and waited, watching his trap anxiously from the bushes.

It didn’t take very long before his first unsuspecting victim, a rather plump coffee-brown hen, wondered right into his