Have bunnies been forgotten

The other day I realized that Ivan hadn't mentioned bunnies in the last few months, so I decided to ask about them.

"What happened to the bunnies? The bunny rabbits," I asked.

Ivan looked at me, as if he didn't understand what I was talking about.

"The bunnies that lived in the cage, under the carpet?"

Is it possible that he forgot about them, I wondered.

"I let them go," he said finally. He seemed to have been thinking up the right answer as he was saying it, as if he thought it up right there, on the fly. Like he had actually forgotten about them.

Who knows, maybe he had forgotten about them. It seems unlikely, considering various other trivia and memories he brings up 4-6 months after the fact.