Bunny

by Mona Awad

  “We were worried,” Fosco says, tapping her bare wrist as though there is a watch there. It’s always unclear to me if Fosco is using the royal we or if she is referring to herself and the Bunnies.

  “Worried?” I repeat.

  “That something happened to you, weren’t we?”

  She looks around at all the Bunnies for confirmation. They nod, their dewy faces turned toward her as though toward a goddess shrine. She was our Workshop leader last spring and though we were supposed to work with the Lion again this fall, they fought to have KareKare come back again. Because she just gets us more. Also, she is just so like a wondrous bear. A care bear! A karekare!

  Yes, KareKare, they nod now. Worried. Very. Oh so concerned.

  “Sorry,” I say. “I got . . .”

  “Lost?” Creepy Doll fills in. Her tiger eyes betray nothing, but her Cupid’s-bow lips curl into a slight smile. I draped my red-riding-hood cloak on your shuddering shoulders while you drunk-cried. Remember?

  “Lost,” Fosco repeats, her rich voice reverberating in the theater. When she repeats the word, the lilt in her tone suggests its aptness in my case. Perhaps, Samantha, you are lost in more ways than one?

  She smiles at me now with her silvery-rose lips. Her hermetic silence filling the air like so much machine-generated fog. There are people who come to Warren just to breathe the same incense-choked air as Fosco. Rabid fangirls who have her name tattooed to the inside of their wrists, the smalls of their backs, their winglike shoulder blades. Who clutch her fiercely experimental novels to their chests like witchy talismans, murmuring passages as though they were prayers, incantations. Because she is so mystical, so maternal, so wise. I am not one of them. When I observe Fosco in her iridescent smock that calls to mind New Age priestesses, her hands performing vaguely gynecological gestures over stories that I’m certain she’s just now speed-reading for the first time, her rose lips spouting cryptic feedback which she’ll punctuate now and then with her infamously ever pregnant pause, I cannot be one of them.

  And yet I am not entirely immune to the occult probing of her eyes contemplating my face now like it’s a lost cause.

  “I’m sorry.” I feel myself flush.

  “It’s a confusing building,” Cupcake says, not looking at me. I watch her absently run a finger along her pearls, her blond bob glowing beneath the lights. Today she’s wearing a dress patterned with patches of green grass. Green cardigan to match. I recall her fervently shaving the cinnamon stick with her golden head tilted back, pearled throat of soft blue veins exposed in open-mouthed ecstasy, and a sudden, violent urge to hug her briefly courses down my arms, making my fingers twitch. She’s never stood up for me before.

  “I still get lost on campus,” Creepy Doll adds. “All the time.”

  “Really, Kira?” KareKare says. “All the time?”

  “Well definitely sometimes. Once for sure I did,” she says, glancing at me. Hi, Bunny.

  I smile at her, awash in gratitude, but she quickly looks away. It’s only then I realize I’ve already walked over to my usual seat, on the opposite side of the square. Habit and muscle memory must have led me there. I hesitate there, my hand on the back of the chair. Maybe I should sit closer to them, maybe it was up to me to sit closer to them? Should I now? I look over, but they’re all focused on KareKare.

  “Everything okay, Samantha?”

  “Fine. Yes. Of course. Sorry.”

  I take my usual seat. Fosco returns to her speech, which concerns this all-important penultimate semester. Our last semester of Workshop. A time in which we must Dig Deep. Ask the big and scary questions of ourselves. Fully embrace the alchemical experience of Creation before we are released into the wilds of our final term, when we will write our theses independently. As she did last year, she uses a lot of birthing metaphors, which I only half hear in my hungover daze, my vague and fluttering panic. Meanwhile, Fosco’s sweatered terrier yips at her heels or else runs idiotic circles around us. She brought it to every class last semester. The Bunnies would coo at the creature for a good fifteen minutes at the start of class while I sat there, pretending to reread whatever random, formally experimental text Fosco had assigned that week, holding the book very close to my face. I’d stare and stare at the dense, unreadable lines while they squealed So cute! So cute! Oh my god, SO. Reminding myself what an opportunity it is to be here, that this school opens doors, so many doors, surely it does, doesn’t it? That I came here because they give you the most funding, the most time to write, both of which I desperately needed. Neither of which I really had when I was working as a bookstore wench, a waitress, an office wench, a waitress again—the only jobs I could seem to get with my English degree.

  Poor Cinderella, Ava says when I tell her this story. Where are your anthropomorphic mice? Your cinder-encrusted frocks?

  But I did need—

  Want, Ava always corrects. Need, my love, is a whole other story. Also, you’re not exactly writing up a storm here, you know.

  It’s true that I wrote way more before I came here. Spent my nights after whatever job or jobs I had in a feverish ecstasy of scrawling on whatever surface was at hand. Since I arrived, not so much. A few faltering stories last fall for the Lion when I still lived under that sun. Since then? Some half-formed things, mostly fragments, phrases. Many, many drawings of eyes. That stare at me.

  I told you it’s crushing your soul.

  But how was I to know that was going to happen? I couldn’t turn down this opportunity. To go to Warren? I mean, it’s Warren. The high experimentalism, the parlance, is annoying, sure, but it’s worth it.

  Is it? Ava always says.

  At last, we move on to discussing this week’s stories, which Fosco asked each of us to write over the summer by either dragging a talisman of our choice through ash or pulling a tarot card from the deck at random, then contemplating it while walking widdershins around a crossroads.

  And you wonder why you’re blocked, Smackie?

  First, Vignette’s piece: a series of unpunctuated vignettes about a woman named Z who pukes up soup while thinking nihilistic thoughts, then has anal sex in a trailer. I hate Vignette’s pieces. They are dreary word puzzles I’m always too bored and annoyed to solve. Each paragraph is a half smile, half frown, way up its own asshole. Also, they beg questions like: when on her perilous, pirouetting journey from Interlochen to Barnard was she ever in a trailer?

  Rich playing poor, Ava would say. Fake white trash by the overeducated. The worst kind. It happens at art school all the time.

  Fosco is looking down at Vignette’s piece the way she normally does, the way she looks at all of their pieces but mine. Like they’re fussy, brilliant, but ever-so-slightly retarded babies. What went wrong in the birth canal? She holds a lantern up in the form of a concerned brow. Well, she’ll announce at last, what do we think? Thoughts?

  “I’m fascinated by the soup,” Cupcake says, as though she is actually fascinated. I notice the urge to hug her has distinctly faded.

  “As am I, Caroline,” Fosco says. “As am I.” She looks back down at the pages.

  “I’d just like to believe it more, I guess,” the Duchess says, like she’s concerned about the prognosis of a disease. “Although I must say, Victoria, it’s just always so interesting how you engage the Body.”

  Murmurs of approval all around. Little nods. Oh, absolutely. I agree. So interesting.

  I record the number 1098 in my notebook. Which is the number of times I’ve heard “the Body” mentioned since being at Warren. Because at Warren, the Body is all the rage. As though everyone in the academic world has just now discovered that they are vesseled in precarious, fastly decaying houses of bone and flesh and my god, what material. What a wealth of themes and plot! I still don’t quite understand what it means to write about The Body with title caps but I always nod like I do. Oh yes, The Body, of course.


  Other words I’ve been keeping track of: space, gesture, and perform.

  “I appreciate the uncertainty the piece gestures toward,” Creepy Doll says. “I just think she could go further into the dream space. It’s so interesting how she performs and reenacts trauma.”

  I watch Vignette actually take notes about this. As though it’s helpful, these insights. Her auburn hair tumbling over one shoulder, an opium cloud surrounding her, even here. As she writes, Cupcake lightly pets her shoulder. Bunny, I love you.

  “What do you think, Samantha?” Fosco asks me.

  That it’s a piece of pretentious shit. That it says nothing, gives nothing. That I don’t understand it, that probably no one does and no one ever will. That not being understood is a privilege I can’t afford. That I can’t believe this woman got paid to come here. That I think she should apologize to trees. Spend a whole day on her knees in the forest, looking up at the trembling aspens and oaks and whatever other trees paper is made of with tears in her languid eyes and say, I’m fucking sorry. I’m sorry that I think I’m so goddamned interesting when it is clear that I am not interesting. Here’s what I am: I’m a boring tree murderess.

  But I look at Vignette, at Creepy Doll, at Cupcake, the Duchess. All of them staring at me now with shy smiles.

  “I think I’d like to see more of the soup too,” I hear myself say.

  Eventually we turn to my piece, one of my last completed stories before my block descended. They’re silent for a long time. Fosco looks at the piece like she doesn’t even know where to begin. No formal experimentation. No character named after a letter of the alphabet. No soup puke nihilism. And a plot of all things, oh, dear.

  I brace myself for their usual criticisms.

  Angry.

  Mean.

  Distant.

  Dark but like not in a good way?

  Funny, yes, but almost too funny?

  Exactly. It’s like what’s behind the laughter, you know?

  But they’re still silent, looking down thoughtfully at the story.

  “It’s weird,” Cupcake says at last. “The first time I read it, I have to confess I was quite put off.” She wrinkles her nose as though the story has a smell she finds unfavorable.

  “Tell us about that, Caroline,” Fosco urges.

  “Well, it just seemed so . . . mean at first.”

  “And angry,” Creepy Doll adds, not looking at me. “And abrasive.”

  “Dark but like not a good dark,” Vignette says.

  “And just way too invested in its own outsiderness.”

  “Exactly. It really keeps the reader at a distance at first. But then . . .”

  “But then?” Fosco prompts.

  “I don’t know. On the second read, I sort of like all of that now. The angsty grittiness, the adolescent rawness. It’s . . . compelling.”

  She looks at me from across the room, tilting her golden head to one side.

  “More vulnerable than I expected. Almost desperate.”

  “Sad,” Vignette says.

  “But in the best way,” Creepy Doll adds.

  “I mean, I still think it could definitely open itself up a bit more. . . . ”

  “A lot more.”

  “And it could definitely use more . . . bounce?” Vignette says, looking at the Duchess, who has said nothing up to this point.

  “We want more, I guess is what we’re saying, Samantha,” the Duchess says. Hands braided over my pages, looking not at me but at Fosco, who nods with motherly gravitas.

  “Does that make sense?”

  8.

  Ava. All week I don’t see her. I walk by her house: dark. I pass by the diner: Ava-less. I go to the bowels of the nature lab where she’s usually to be found sitting among the drawers of dead bugs or else in the basement library shelving what she calls the True Corpses. Because books are dead, Smackie, didn’t you know? Because almost no one comes down here but you. I turn on the humming light in every aisle, but she is not smoking and reading among the tall dark stacks. I call her name until a man sitting at a desk nearby turns and frowns at me. Can I help you?

  She isn’t sitting on the dumpster behind the undergrad dorms, legs swinging, fists full of Warren spoils. She isn’t at the anarchy bookstore, browsing through the new acquisitions. She isn’t sitting on the domed roof of the science building like a glam rock gargoyle.

  I go back to the park bench by the pond where I usually meet her. The bench is empty. I gaze at the pond’s still surface, the tree leaves winking and shivering around me in the afternoon light. Even before Ava, I used to come here by myself. To feel less lonely. To write, though I never did. I’d just sit here with an untouched coffee beside me, a notebook in my lap, a pen in my lax hand, watching a lone swan turn circles in the sludgy water. For hours I’d do this. I’d come here after class, with the insular laughter of the Bunnies still ringing in my ears. Or before class, bracing myself to go, just go, this is fucking ridiculous, what are you afraid of anyway? On weekends, telling myself I enjoyed this break, I was glad for this time alone with no plans, never any plans, it was good for my work, absolutely. I did love the quiet. How there was never anyone here. Except the swan, of course. Turning and turning its lonely circles. Or else just drifting there. And then, one morning, one terrible-wonderful morning, there was Ava. Sitting on the bench like she’d always been there. Asking me for a light I didn’t know I had.

  But now, there’s no swan on the water.

  No Ava either.

  All I see are the people she hates and the golden light she hates more falling upon buildings she wants to set fire to.

  And bunnies.

  So many bunnies. I do not believe my eyes. But they are there. Possibly they were always there. Hopping across the green. Dashing across my path and disappearing into a cluster of bushes. Tripping me up on the winding campus paths like so many soft, heavy stones. Each time I see one, I feel a little lash of fear and excitement in my gut. I recall the soft but heavy magic of the animal in my lap that night. Me drunkenly staring down into its twitching, leporine face. An upstairs window turning on, then off. Their little-girl voices warm and peltlike in my ears.

  See how easy, Samantha? We told you.

  * * *

  —

  Every day they dog me, little furred shadows. One afternoon on the bench, I look up from my reading to find one, two, four bunnies. Sort of surrounding me in a little fuzzy circle like I’m their leader, about to give a speech. I even find myself opening my mouth. Then I close it again. Get up and leave. Walk hurriedly away toward the library. Don’t follow me. Okay?

  A couple of Wes Anderson–type girls stare at me through their hipster frames. Little silky French shifts with an understated pattern. Little smirks to match. Because I’m a grown woman talking to rabbits. I remember the man I saw on my walk to school, screaming at a tree. What did it ever do to you? I wanted to ask him. Now I’m not so sure it’s a fair question.

  “Don’t follow me!” I hiss at the rabbits under my breath.

  “Samantha?” Jonah in his parka, cigarette burning between his fingers. Wheat-colored hair in his eyes. Grinning at me like I’m Christmas.

  “Hey, Jonah. Sorry I was—”

  “Hey, were you just talking to those rabbits?”

  “No.”

  “It’s cool if you were. Sometimes I talk to things too.” He nods as if to reassure me. “And they are staring at you pretty hard. Weird.”

  “They are?” Even though I know they are.

  “Oh yeah. Definitely. Wow. I’ve never seen anything like that before. It’s almost like they want to talk to you or something. Are you freaked out by it?”

  “No,” I lie.

  “You shouldn’t be. One time in Alaska, this bear followed me home from a bar and we ended up talking for a long time. He was telling me all thes
e things. I guess because he knew I was a poet and he needed someone, you know, to tell his story.”

  We look back at the rabbits, who are still looking at me.

  “Maybe you’re part rabbit and you don’t know it.” He smiles at me. “Hey, you want to go for a drink or something? I just got out of class. We could go to the ale house?”

  “I thought you didn’t drink.”

  “Yeah. But I could watch you drink? I like doing that.”

  Over his shoulder, I look at the bunnies. They are fucking staring at me.

  “I can’t right now, Jonah. I’m sorry. Maybe some other time, though, okay?”

  I rush off and nearly trip on a shaggy gray one crossing the road. It gets hit by a car that doesn’t even break and I scream.

  * * *

  —

  “Hi, Samantha,” the Bunnies say now whenever they see me on campus. They smile at me like I’m a boy they might like, they’re not sure yet. Wave at me from across the green where they sit in their little cluster. Hello. Hi. Hey. Bonjour, Samantha. They attempt to make awkward small talk. Ask me how my week is going. Vignette’s half smile waxes to three quarters. Cupcake shyly offers me a cupcake. Tells me she likes my dress even though I am not wearing a dress. I am never wearing a dress. But I say, Thanks. I like yours too. Creepy Doll gives me a sharp, glittering black rock. For your altar, Bunny. You do have an altar, right? I don’t, but I just smile as if to say, yes, I do, thanks so much for this. Twice in class, the Duchess reaches out and puts her hand on my wrist. Says my name with a voice like a lacy embrace.

  They do not mention Smut Salon except to say, That was super fun. Wasn’t it?

  Yeah, I say. It was. It’s only when I say this that I realize I’m not lying. It’s true.

  It was fun, I repeat.

  I want to ask them, Did you really ask me to hunt a bunny? Did a bunny leap into my lap?

  I want to tell them, You know, rabbits are following me now.

  We should do it again sometime, Creepy Doll says shyly, like they’re asking me on a second date.