Bunny

by Mona Awad

  “It just did,” Vignette says, looking at me like she wants to bludgeon me with her eyes.

  They all look over at the Duchess, who says nothing because her silence says it all. She sips her pale violet cocktail, made for her by Borges Julio Bolano VII. He’s put an extra lychee in it, just like she likes.

  “What were you thinking about, Samantha?”

  “Nothing,” I lie. “I just tried to think of what I wanted. Like you guys said.”

  They look at me. Liar.

  “Did you visualize? Did you focus? Like we said?”

  “Yes. I mean, I tried.” I lower my eyes to the perfect floor, the dark cherry wood polished and unscuffed as far as the eye can see.

  Vignette gets up. “I’m out,” she says. “See y’all tomorrow in class.”

  We watch her go. Listen to her combat bootlets stomp away down the hall. Then she suddenly stops.

  “Oh my god, you guys,” she calls from the front door. “Come here.”

  There, in the shimmery snow, lit up by the moon, are animal prints. They start in the center of the lawn, directly below the window, and make their winding way down her glittering white lawn, circling once around a skinny tree before moving onto the sidewalk and then across the street to the bus shelter.

  They’re much too big for a bunny, I think, but then I follow Vignette’s gaze to the bus shelter. The dark, hunched shape inside.

  A boy-shaped shape.

  A boy.

  My heart starts to thump in my chest.

  20.

  He stands in the far corner of the bus shelter beside a wall of shattered glass. Smoking a cigarette, headphones on. Doesn’t look up even though five jacketless girls have just joined him in the shelter, standing in its drippy mouth, staring and staring.

  “Well, Samantha?” Creepy Doll whispers, tugging on my sleeve.

  The moon’s gone behind a cloud, and I can’t see his face. Just a wolfish slope to the profile. Dark, disheveled hair. Beaten-up black trench coat. He starts nodding along to the music in his headphones. Honestly, he just looks like a guy waiting for a bus.

  “A bus weirdo,” Cupcake whispers, staring at him intently.

  “A hot bus weirdo,” Vignette corrects. “Well done, Samantha.”

  “Look what he’s wearing though. He’s a Satanist.”

  “Or an art student? Or a vagrant, maybe,” Creepy Doll whispers in her group hug voice.

  “He didn’t knock on the front door,” Cupcake says softly. “They’re supposed to knock.”

  “Well, but Samantha’s bunny might be different,” Creepy Doll says. “Like more . . . I don’t know . . . of an asshole? Or something?”

  They turn to me, waiting for some kind of pronouncement. Is he or isn’t he? Answer for him, please. I look at him again. He’s completely oblivious to us, or so it seems. His tall, broad frame like a Muir Woods tree. Cheekbones like knives. Something vaguely punk, vaguely murderous about his hair. He seems to be smiling to himself. Is he? Yes, smiling as though the music is telling him a secret. He begins to hum in a rich, low voice.

  “I don’t know,” I say.

  “You should say something to him. Just in case.”

  Even in the dark, he looks like he could absolutely cut our heads right off. His fuck-off vibe is emanating from him like heat.

  “Like what?” I hiss.

  “I don’t know. It’s s your bunny. Maybe.”

  “Guys, it’s not like he can hear us, fuck,” Vignette says in her normal tone of voice. “Watch. HEY, ARE YOU A BOY OR A BUNNY?”

  “Shhh. Shut up!”

  “Excuse me?” The man slides his headphones down to his neck. He’s looking right at us now, his face still mostly shrouded in shadow. But I can make out a full, unscarred mouth. Smiling slightly. At something. Us? Maybe us.

  I feel the Bunnies push me forward a little.

  “Sorry to bother you,” I tell the man, who is probably just a man. Maybe a murderer. Probably a decapitator. “We were just looking . . . we lost something.”

  “A bunny,” Cupcake says. “Have you seen one by chance?”

  “Hopping by?” Creepy Doll adds.

  “Or a boy,” Vignette says. The legs of her voice wide open. The others glare at her.

  He stares at us, saying nothing. Can we go before he kills us? But they’ve pinned me in place on either side with their sharp shoulder bones.

  “You know, a bunny,” Creepy Doll continues. “Long ears? Hops around?”

  “He knows what a bunny is, Bunny,” Cupcake says.

  “And what a boy is,” Vignette says, the legs of her voice spreading even wider.

  Oh my god, shut up, I think. Just fucking shut up and let’s leave.

  The man frowns, like he is thinking. His coat falls open to reveal a black T-shirt featuring a skull over a moon-splashed sea.

  “A bunny . . . ,” he says slowly, looking at me. Deep voice. Like the word tastes surprisingly good in his mouth. Needs salt. But not bad. “Yes. I definitely saw a bunny.”

  “You did?” Cupcake says eagerly.

  Liar, I think.

  The smoke coils out of his nostrils like twin snakes.

  “Yup. Hopping right across the snow here. Long ears and everything. Went that way.” He points down the street.

  “Thank you!”

  “Until it died tragically,” he adds.

  “What?”

  The man half smiles with his unripped mouth. “Red wolf. Came out of nowhere. Tore the little guy’s throat right out. Right before my eyes. So sad.” Clearly a fake sad smile, but I can see they’re swallowing it whole. He rests his gaze on me. Nothing blue or voidlike about his eyes. I start to feel the back of my neck get prickly and hot.

  “Then he dragged him by the neck into those bushes back there.”

  We stare at the bushes. There are actually small animal prints in the snow. They gasp dramatically like little girls, their grips tightening around my arms like pythons.

  “Bad scene,” he says.

  “How bad?” Vignette says.

  He gazes at Vignette dreamily, contemplating her lovely skull face. “Gross,” he says softly, making a face. “Like . . . ew.”

  All around me I feel them nod. Ew. Yes. So ew.

  “I don’t know if you’ve ever heard a bunny scream?” he says.

  They shake their heads. No, they lie. Never ever.

  “Terrible sound. But it was also sort of . . .” He trails off. I can feel their puppyish blood boiling under their soft-serve skins.

  “Beautiful,” he finishes, looking so soberly, so intently at them, at us, that I want to burst out laughing even though I’m afraid. Suddenly, I feel them all sigh around me in stereo.

  “Beautiful,” they repeat.

  “I’m sure it was.”

  “Yes.”

  “So.”

  They stare at him with parted lips. Clutching each other’s sleeves, and mine. Shifting their weight. Tossing their hair. Running their tongues over their teeth.

  The man looks at me. “Yours?” he says.

  “Mine?”

  “The bunny.”

  “Oh. Yes.”

  “Sort of,” Creepy Doll corrects.

  “More like a collaborative effort, really,” Cupcake says.

  “It was ours,” the Duchess says coldly. I realize this is the first time she’s spoken. “It was our bunny.”

  “Nature’s so cruel,” he says. “The wild.”

  He reaches inside his black coat, and the girls gasp again. Gun? Knife? Ax? Cigarette. Lighter. A flash of his wolfish face in the flame. Hands, ungloved and totally human. No claws, no hooks, just flesh. Even though I already knew there was no way in hell, my heart sinks. Failure. I’m a failure.

  I turn to go, expecting them to fo
llow me. But they just stand there, watching him smoke in the shadows.

  “I’m Caroline.”

  “Kira.”

  “Victoria.”

  “Eleanor.”

  He looks at me. Well?

  “Samantha,” I say.

  “Samantha,” he repeats. I can feel him smiling at me in the dark.

  “Can we give you a lift somewhere?” Cupcake offers.

  He turns and looks at Cupcake, her dress patterned with unicorns in midleap.

  “Because I think it might be too late for a bus,” she adds.

  Just then, a bus comes around the bend. He straightens up to his full height, and he doesn’t even have to say Excuse me. When he steps toward the mouth of the shelter, we instantly part like a bland sea. As he passes us, I catch a whiff of something animal and alive. Urgent and vital like blood. Then something like white sage.

  “Where are you heading?” I ask him.

  He smiles at me. “Home.”

  “Home,” I repeat but it’s in stereo. Do I have other mouths? No, we all repeated it.

  “Where’s home?” one of them asks. Eleanor.

  But he puts his headphones back on. Suddenly, I feel the cold, snowy sludge around my toes. I start to shiver. Their grips around my arms go slack as I watch him disappear into the bus. And then I watch the bus disappear into the dark.

  21.

  Last Workshop of the semester. I sit alone again, like before, on the opposite side of the hollow square, trying to bore a hole through the Cave wall with my eyes. I wish for a clock. A window for my brain to jump out of, leaving my body here, a lifeless flesh sack. I stare at Fosco as she speaks her inane words of congratulations on the end of a great semester. There’s an unopened packet of cashews on the table. A bottle of midpriced red wine. To celebrate our little Circle, she said. We girls have really Tapped the Wound.

  I watch her terrier, whose sweater today is Yule themed, turn his yipping circles. Failure. I’m a failure.

  “What’s that, Samantha?”

  “Nothing.”

  She returns to her speech and they keep nodding. Yes, KareKare. The Wound. The Circle. They do not look at me. I do not look at them. Last night seems as unspeakable as money or a fart.

  Too bad, Samantha, they said to me afterward. Sometimes you fail. Miserably. Hopelessly. It happens even to the best of us. Well, not to us, it’s never happened to us. But it CAN happen. In theory. And that guy! I’m so surprised he didn’t rape us. Repeatedly. Or kill us. Or do some sick thing in between? And oh my god, that story he told about the wolf? So weird. Obviously twisted. Probably we shouldn’t have told him our names. He won’t remember, will he? I mean, it’s not like we’re traceable or anything? Like he could track us down? Like on Facebook or anything? He’s insane, remember? Murderous. Probably he doesn’t even have Facebook. I was like a breath away from calling the police the whole time. Or campus safety. Or like, just screaming “rape.” You’re supposed to yell “fire,” though. Because no one comes when you yell “rape,” didn’t you know that, Bunny?

  * * *

  —

  What a special group this has been, Fosco is saying now, and from the way she avoids my eyes I know she means them, not me. Warren’s first all-female fiction cohort. And the talent so varied, so enormous. The collective energy so distinct. We really dug into the depths of ourselves. We really embraced the Experience. All of us, she says, and again I am not included in the faux magical-maternal embrace of her gaze.

  “Ursula,” the Duchess says, suddenly clasping the hands of Cupcake and Vignette, who flank her like girl Dobermans, “I think I can speak for all of us when I say that it’s been such a privilege to work with you. It has really reshaped the way we approach the Work. We’ve all learned so much.”

  I watch as they hand her a ficus with a big red bow on the pot, which I did not know they were going to buy her, which I was not asked to chip in for. There’s a card too, with a bunny in a Santa hat on it that they’ve all signed but me. “Oh. When did you arrange this?” I ask.

  But my question is drowned in the collective cooing that erupts. Fosco clasps her hand to her smocked chest, as though deeply touched. The Bunnies feign being touched at her feigning being touched. Or are they all truly touched? I don’t know anymore.

  “Oh, my,” she says. “You really didn’t have to. And on your stipends too.”

  They’re rich for fuck’s sake, I want to scream. But I just sit there. My smile is fixed on my face, nailed there, though it jerks under the pins.

  “We wanted to,” the Duchess says.

  Fosco is so moved, her silk scarf ripples with the force of her feigned emotion. She repeats that she hopes we enjoy this break. Because the next semester, our final semester before we graduate, will fly by, just as this one did. She hopes we have a firm grasp on our thesis because alas, the collective journey ends here. Next semester we’ll be Tapping the Wound all on our own. They all nod knowingly, humbly, dutifully, except for me. This room should have a fucking clock. It’s too disorienting. Not to know the time. “Does anyone have the time?” I ask.

  They all turn to look at me, acknowledging my presence for the first time. In shock.

  “Is there somewhere else you need to be, Samantha?” Fosco asks.

  “No. I just. Like to know the time, that’s all.”

  “I see.” She looks at me like perhaps I should examine that desire. Unpack it. Take it to lunch. Divine it via a tarot card, a rune stone, the mulch of a bitter herb I’ve chewed and then spit up.

  “Well, I personally love not knowing,” Vignette says.

  “Me too. So much,” agrees Creepy Doll.

  “So refreshing to enter a space where you can leave the real world behind,” adds Eleanor.

  “Oh my god, I was just going to say that,” says Cupcake.

  “I find it disorienting,” I say.

  Silence. A cough. Then, from Fosco, in a voice like she is diffusing an intricate potion, “Disorientation can be a very interesting space to occupy as a writer, Samantha. You should try it as an exercise over the holidays. It could be quite illuminating for you, I think.”

  Then she turns back to the group. “Write during the break, ladies. But remember to take it easy too. You deserve it. You’ve worked so very hard. Now have some wine, why don’t you?”

  They help her pour it into little clear plastic cups, but Fosco and I are the only ones who drink. I am hoping it will warm me—I am somehow still so cold from the night before—but it tastes rancid, cold, thick as blood. I’m about to get up, leave the classroom—class is dismissed, isn’t it?—when the Duchess speaks.

  “I wonder if we could do a short writing exercise to celebrate our last day,” she says. I suddenly grow hot. No. No, Fosco. Please.

  But Fosco is already frothing at the mouth with pleasure. Such commitment! So keen we are to make every moment of Workshop generative.

  “Eleanor. What a marvelous idea. I’m afraid I didn’t plan on an exercise but—”

  “Oh, well. Too bad,” I jump in, about to grab my coat, but then I realize I never took it off.

  “Well, I actually have an idea for what we could do, if I may.” This from Creepy Doll.

  I turn to Fosco, hoping she’ll interpret this as mutiny, an attempt to one up or dethrone her, but instead she is all charitable ears.

  “Tell us, Kira.”

  “Well, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about . . . home.”

  When she says it, the cold evaporates and I suddenly grow flush. I am melting-freezing in the middle of a road of ice slush watching a bus disappear into the dark.

  “Since I mean . . . we’re all going home,” she says. “And since the holidays are really about home . . . I wonder if we should spend a few minutes writing about what home might mean. To each of us. What might home mean to Samantha, f
or example.”

  “What,” I say, but it isn’t a question.

  “Like, is it a literal place? With an address?”

  “Or is it something more . . . elusive?”

  “What images does it generate?”

  My face and neck burn. Mocking me. They’re mocking me.

  “For all of us,” the Duchess adds magnanimously.

  “For each of us,” Vignette adds.

  Fosco nods gravely. “Interesting,” she says, though this exercise is beneath the creative capacities of a twelve-year-old. “Why don’t we take a few minutes to meditate on this subject?”

  In the course of those minutes, I drink more of the red wine. The burning increases. I am burning now not only up my neck and ears, but all down my body. In my mind, I remove one sweater after another. I watch them all scribble in their notebooks.

  Once the minutes are up, I am not at all surprised to hear them say, I think we should share our work. I think we should read it aloud. Agreed. All of us.

  The last work we’ll share as a cohort, as a Circle.

  Fosco thinks it’s a splendid idea.

  I listen to overwritten descriptions of staring deeply into a bonfire on a Costa Rican shore. Of getting pretend-lost in a labyrinthine garden with oh so many nooks and twists. Of being existential in LA, New York, but really, obviously, being rich. And content. And unalone.

  “Samantha, your turn.”

  “Yes, Samantha, I wonder what home means to you.”

  I look down at my notebook, where I have written I’ll never tell you a thousand times.

  “Samantha?” Fosco prompts.

  “I’d prefer not to share mine.”

  “I’m sorry? What was that?”

  “I’D PREFER NOT TO SHARE MINE.” My shout bounces off the walls of the Cave. Echoing and echoing.

  They gape at me in affected horror. Then smile helplessly at Fosco—you see? She looks at me like, indeed, yes, she sees all. Oh, dear, Samantha. We have quite the long journey ahead of us, don’t we? Her reindeer dog stops yipping. Lifts his floppy ears and looks at me with a cocked head. Almost pityingly.

  * * *