by Mona Awad
“I think I fucked up,” she says.
“What do you mean you fucked up?” Kira asks.
A creature comes running out of the bathroom howling. An animal man. Furry skinned. Floppy eared. Still wearing his dark blue suit. There’s an ax stuck deep in its furry shoulder, blood gushing terribly from the cleaved flesh. I watch him run shrieking past the rainbow under which I sit screaming. And yet all that comes tumbling from my mouth is laughter. Laughter like a laughing brook, my waters sparkling in the sun.
“Use the bucket, Bunny!”
Over my bucket rim, I see Caroline is shaking her head endlessly, angrily, at Kira, who sighs and rolls her eyes while the shrieking, wounded bunny boy runs frantic circles around them. Kira slowly gets up, walks to the wall. Pulls another ax out from behind a chest of drawers. Walks slowly over to the bunny boy, now collapsed in a crying heap on the floor. Raises the ax high above her head.
I shake my head, I close my eyes.
No.
No, no, no, no, no, no—
A cracking sound that makes my skull thrum. Then a heavy thud. Dragging. A terrible, slow dragging. A door closing shut.
When I open my eyes, Kira is leaning against the closed bathroom door, gripping the ax loosely in her tiny hand. She is covered in shining blood like the toy bride sitting in the book. She looks smaller than I’ve ever seen her. Her pale dollface is solemn.
“You guys, I can’t keep doing this. I’m going to start having nightmares, seriously.”
Caroline nods, hugs her while she cries a little.
“It’s your gift, Bunny. You’re wonderfully brave. I love you.”
“I love you, Bunny.”
I watch them all hug each other, covered in rabbit guts. Their pink bodies framed by my own rabbit eyes. It’s sweet, I think. They’re nice people.
Finally, Eleanor lets herself out of the huddle.
“Okay,” she says. “Thoughts? Responses?”
“I think next time we try for more verisimilitude. I didn’t believe the French thing. Perhaps it’s a quick fix. A question of adding something simple, like a scarf.”
“I’d like to see more complexity—more Hamlet-esque brooding. But also more cockiness. But also more pride?”
“I’d like to see more animal magnetism.”
“Animal magnetism? But we were going for French. Again, we have to think of verisimilitude here.”
“In terms of viscerality, I’m not really connecting to the height. I understand we want to go for realism, but I still think we could push that a little more? Even a few inches would help.”
“Speaking of which, his cock better work this time. Is all I’m saying.”
Silence.
“We should bring Samantha into this conversation. Since she’s here anyway.”
They all turn to look at me.
“Samantha, any thoughts?”
They smile encouragingly as they wait now for my words. As though I have words they want. They want me. Their bloody faces regarding me so kindly, so openly, that I know this is a friendship moment. All I have to do is give my words. What words, though? You know the words, Samantha, and their eyes shine and shine at me like the smiling eyes of Pinkie Pie on her perch. So many sparkles I am blinded.
“Scarves. I love scarves,” I tell them.
* * *
—
Three bunny explosions later, in which the ax gets bloodier and bloodier, the air becoming thick with the scent of dead bunny and boy, Odysseus IV is before us. A sandy blond. Scarved. Slight harelip.
“Bonjour,” we say. “Hello.”
Odysseus IV looks deeply into each of our eyes. Smiles at us with his twisted lips.
“Tell me everything,” he says.
And suddenly, I’m lost in his eyes the blue of food coloring. My blood sparkles. My heart is bliss. A song I used to hate that I loved surround-sounds my soul. It is a song about nightmares dressed as daydreams, about trading your soul for a kiss. I think not this song, never this song, but my soul is already singing along, riding its swells like an ocean wave, shimmering.
Kira pats my back, the handle of the bloodied ax still in her little fist.
“Welcome to Workshop, Bunny.”
Part Two
15.
We huddle-hug on the velvety green among the cherry blossom trees. We link arms. We close our eyes the better to feel each other’s bodies. We form a hot little circle of love and understanding. We press our faces into our faces, our cheeks against our cheeks, our eyelashes tickling our skins like little hummingbird wings, like Bunny nose twitches.
Oh, Bunny, I love you.
I love you, Bunny.
We cannot say how long we have been here, hugging like this. Because it is that time of day where we thank each other for breathing. Post-Workshop hug time. A hug to take away all of our owies. The ones that come with sharing your story aka soul in a classroom setting. Though today we really don’t need one. We were so brilliant in the Cave today. We were such bright, shining lights. We were so the daughters of Woolf, you should have seen us. In fact, halfway through the class we had to put on sunglasses to shield our eyes from how bright our stars were. We told each other, Bunny, you are so brilliant, you are so famous in waiting, can we have your autograph now please?
KareKare did say some not nice things about our stories, though.
We are too pretty, she said. We need to be rougher, rawer. She looked at our heart’s blood in the form of four double-spaced pages in carefully chosen fonts and she said: Where? Where is the heart? Where is the heat?
Also, we need to get down in the muck more. We nodded. We took notes with our multicolored pens into our Moleskines, our Clairefontaines, our Rhodias. We pretended to look thoughtful, narrowed our eyes. Meanwhile we were thinking: What does this mean, muck? We pictured an awful swamp overseen by a god of nightmares. Is KareKare a god of nightmares?
She was not entirely convinced either about our desire to write on rose petals.
* * *
—
The poets aka the Reptile People pass us huddle-hugging on the green. They are getting out of their own Workshop with their professor, Silky, KareKare’s husband, who wants to have sex with us so badly, and has made this known in so many silky, nonverbal ways. The poets are on their way to get beers in the basement bar across the street, which smells of stale kegs and fake cheese. They stare at us with judgy eyes as they pass, grunting nobly in their fake poor clothes. They think we are such stupid girls. The way we hug each other so much. The way we sometimes groom each other at their lame parties by the light of their lame fires, while they roll and roll their eyes until only the whites show. The way we do not want to talk about scansion. The way we do not wish to pretend to be poor, sorry (well, most of us). Or is it our amazingly empathic hive mind that we make by hugging so that we become one of those animals with a brain and heart in each tentacle that connects to a bigger, cosmic heart-brain that is like a shared, all-seeing third eye? Who knows? Who cares? Fuck you, poets. You think you are so smart, so cool with your word art. You have no idea. Can you conjure hybrid spaces? Can you perform the Body and have the Body perform, literally? Can you make a Viking masseuse? A pre-TB Keats? A talky Tim Riggins?
Can you make a bunny explode with the combined force of your eight eyes?
Ten, Bunny. Your eyes too.
It is so amazing to see the bunny explode, by the way. We are barely even grossed out anymore. Now we light a cigarette with the guts still in our hair and we lean against Bunny’s bloody shoulder and we wait for the knock on the door. It is so amazing when we hear the knock knock sound. It is so amazing to see a boy of flesh smiling at us where a bunny used to be. Hello, Samantha, he’ll say. Tell me everything.
Not a boy, Bunny, remember. A Hybrid. Or a Darling. Or a Draft. We keep telling you.
It makes us feel a
little like God. No, we can’t go that far. In fact, we are a little fearful of God right now, if he’s out there.
She, Bunny. If She’s out there.
Or It. We like to think of It more as an energy.
And don’t worry, It would approve.
So approve. Of us.
Because look at what we just did. Look at him.
So what if they all look the same? Like Cape Cod in boy form. Sometimes like the classic film stars or fairy-tale princes of yesteryear.
So what if they all say the same things? Tell me everything. Your beauty is like screaming, like Proust, like a Frenchy film complete with sound track. You’re a daughter of Woolf.
So what if anatomically there are some things missing? Essential things. Like hands, genitals. An untwisted mouth. Possibly a soul. Still, it’s a good start. We’ll get better.
In the meantime, look. He is holding an orchid just for us, which, if we take it from him quickly, he won’t eat first. He is brushing our hair. Doing it so tenderly, he doesn’t mean to rap the brush handle against our scalp at all. He is painting strange flowers and blobby birds on our fingernails. He is saying we are so beautiful and wild like the black moors of the Brontës, he is saying our talents are as deep as the North Sea. He is saying, Love your dress. He is saying, Pinkberry, would you like some? He is helping us in the kitchen to make Light and Sunnies or Lady Grey tea, and so what if he is more trouble than he is help? So what if he cries when we say, Will you fuck us? So what if he explodes when we say, Tell me something about you.
It’s amazing, what it promises. We’re not bored in the slightest ever, ever. We’re blown away.
“Hey, Samantha,” a boy with a soup-bowl haircut calls across the quad now, waving. “How are you? Are you still talking to rabbits? Hey, are you okay?”
Amazing. We’re all amazing.
We keep hugging until the Reptile People pass us like a cloud of bad will, until our hearts feel light again, like they are going to burst out of our chests with glee, the way we felt when we made Glitter Viggo or whenever we think of unicorns, until one of us says, Can we go to Mini, please?
* * *
—
We go to Mini and we order everything on the menu. Mini fries, mini shakes, mini wings, which are wings from these super-small birds. We know the boy in back who pulls them off their tiny bodies. One of ours that was spared the ax. He doesn’t even flinch when he tells us about it even though we are like ew, ew, ew, stop it! We forget his name. Maybe Hotspur or Rimbaud VI or was it Jorg?
The ones that don’t work out for us for a number of reasons, we let go. Really, it’s the best thing for them, Bunny says. The ones who bite, the ones who scream, usually get the ax. Unless Bunny is too tired to put on her apron. Then they go in the basement for a while until Bunny feels like taking a long, long drive. That’s when we lead them out the back door at a very dark hour. We drive them out to a field or a warehouse area on the west side and drop them off. Bunny says we’re setting them free.
Usually Bunny takes them, because she has the SUV and the strongest emotional constitution. We went with her once. Keep me company, Bunny! Bunny said. And after this we can get drive-thru fries.
Okay, Bunny, we said.
But it was a not-nice drive. What with the whimpering boys—the whimpering Hybrids, Bunny—in the trunk whimpering their scrambled words. Hunt you I will! Everything tell me! Virginia Woolf is not your daughter! I sentence you to a nuanced labyrinth.
Bunny tried to drown them out by cranking her cherubic harp music, but we could still hear them. Why do we have to take them so far? we asked her.
Bunny, we already told you. Otherwise they come back.
Is that really ethical, though, Bunny? To just take them to the other side of town and leave them there? If they’re dangerous? If they have nowhere to go?
Ethical? Bunny repeated like she’d never heard the word, even though obviously she had, she is so, so smart. She has been going to the best schools in the world since she was five. She can play the oboe and she can fence and she speaks three dead languages. Ethical, Bunny said, like we’d made the word up. Like it was just some silly monster we were trying to make out of our own hair, which she herself lovingly braided for us.
She stared at the windshield. Uh-oh. We upset her. Don’t be upset, Bunny!
We think of it as art meets life, Bunny. We’re putting art into the world. It’s like a living interactive installation. You know? But I mean, if you’d rather kill them, you go right ahead, Bunny.
No. That’s okay. We can’t bring ourselves to brandish an ax just yet, Bunny knows that.
We have nightmares every night as it is, Bunny knows that too. And who is there for us when we wake up? Bunny is.
Shhh, Bunny, Bunny will say, stroking our damp forehead, our sticky braids. Putting her hand on our heart to stop it from beating. Take these. They’ll help you sleep.
She turned up the cherubic harp music. Each song is twenty minutes long and meanders like a bitchy cat. The woman’s high folksy voice hurts our teeth but we would never tell Bunny this. We said we loved this song. So much. But Bunny wasn’t listening. Bunny was singing along in her own high voice. Cherubic harp music is her very, very favorite.
* * *
—
Here at Mini they have many cupcakes in mini but they should have more. Why don’t they have more? They should have more in mini, more! We tell them how they should have more in mini and they do not seem to make a note of it.
Bunny touches none of it. She is the most upset of all of us about Workshop because of the not-nice things KareKare said about her diamond proems.
Bunny, we say, what does she know, really?
Eat, Bunny, we say, please eat something, please.
For us?
Because we don’t want you to die, Bunny!
We don’t want to live in a world without you!
If you died, we would absolutely die too. Please eat, Bunny, please, please, please!
Bunny, we know you sometimes get depressed that your sister is this incredible neurologist in training or whatever and that you have basically lived in her shadow for twenty years reading and seething. But then the day came when you went into your mother’s room and dragged her diamond ring across her vanity mirror then along all of the windows in your house, etching messages from the goddess of Wisdom. That was the day a literary star was born, Bunny. That was the day you started giving your special gift of you to the world. Sure your sister saves lives, Bunny, but you save souls with your diamond proems. And how many people can say that?
We watch Bunny touch a mini churro with her delicate fingers. Then we clap our hands as she begins to touch all of it with her mouth. She will not die, not today, and we thank the unicorn goddess to whom we quickly prayed.
We move the conversation to more interesting talk. Like Who will be our next Boy—we mean Hybrid? Hmm?
We think about this. It is such fun to brainstorm possibilities with our glitter pens. To take notes upon notes in our leather-bound notebooks with the designer tree paper! To skim the literature and movies and music and myths of the world and take only the cream.
But Bunny says we aren’t going deep enough. We need to go deeper. We need to be rougher, rawer, and richer, like the night.
Okay, Bunny, we whisper. Okay.
We think, think, think.
Bunny takes a sip of her mini French 75 and looks at us, each one of us, over the rim, challenging us. Maybe even daring us. Daring her fellow Bunnies. Which is a little mean but we let it go because we love you, Bunny.
“Perhaps some sort of revisionist fairy-tale work?” Bunny suggests. “A subversive play on canonical tropes?”
Which we know is short for Bunny wanting a merman again. Or another wolf in the woods. Or some pale, sober prince emerging from the briars to climb her hair. Bu
nny looking down from her tower in a red cloak. Or a dress made of rags. Or a dress made of gold?
But Bunny doesn’t like this direction. Bunny thinks the merman/wolf/prince idea is dumb. Child’s play. Too heteronormative. We agree. No, Bunny. We love you, but no.
“How about a confluence of postcolonialism and literary horror?” suggests Bunny.
Which means she wants a mitigated Dracula again. Not someone who will actually bite her neck and draw blood, but who will maybe drink red cocktails with her in a darkish bar. Speak with a slight but indiscernible accent. Not kill her but sort of look like he’s going to all the time—it’s just his foreign intensity. Or perhaps a Moorish prince with kohl-lined eyes, familiar with unorthodox hair-braiding techniques and the writings of Sade. An Other but not a so Scary Other that he won’t be able to make her tea with the dainty gestures of an anemic Englishman.
We wrinkle our nose at Bunny’s suggestion. We’re concerned about the degree of Othering, the Orientalism that you’re engaging in, Bunny. We feel you should be more mindful of this.
“Perhaps then we could draw from film, winkingly indulge in some campy nostalgia,” offers Bunny.
This means Bunny wants James Dean again, leaning against a wooden post again. John Cusack in Say Anything again, holding up his boom box in the rain again. Marlon Brando again, screaming for Stella in the steamy night again. And Bunny at the French-doored balcony again in a white strapless dress patterned with one-eyed birds again. Sweat beads blooming on her upper lip with every roar of her name. Again.
More nose wrinkles. Tsk tsk. Reinforcing old narratives, Bunny. Bunny, it’s so great you were a failed actress once and that you still want everything to be a scene that is just so. Probably you were so amazing even though they said you weren’t pretty or thin enough no matter how much you threw up, but Bunny, what did they know, we think you are so, so beautiful. Still you’re not on the stage anymore, Bunny. You have to think bigger, wilder, please.