Bunny and Shark

by Alisha Piercy

  Somewhere in that reverie, the real scene comes up abruptly. The contrast smacks you when your foot hits the shallow point of sand and you stumble up onto the beach full of people. It is now, as your heavy thighs readjust to land and you drag your body forward, that you remember what it is you have to do:

  Air dry, and march to town like you own the place. Those words sit unsteady in your mind as you step forward, the aloe ladies with their baskets passing you on their way to the resorts. Something in your walk, your eyes without sunglasses, makes you doubt you’ll hold sway. You’re not carrying a single thing in your hands. How will you buy hair dye with no money? How much time do you have left?

  At the central square you sit by the edge of a café and watch the men in their fifties with young, exquisite girls on their arms. Beautiful girls, Russian dancers, you’ve seen them all before at cocktails and parties. At your own parties. They’d fawned over you, admired your good taste, what you said, what you didn’t say. They were pregnant and growing silent. Driving their old boys’ sports cars into town, finally secure. Finally they could breathe. You shake your head. Of course, of course, those girls aren’t stupid.

  You have no idea how long or how far you may have to walk in the coming days. Land now. It’s harsher than the ocean. How it sits there, laid out under the sun for hours like that, with nothing to cool it off. You squeeze your eyes shut. Open them again onto the crisp scene of shoppers and drinkers and high-pitched music and movement in all directions. The lowlands, where you need to get to, are opposite to the town: dusty, rocky, lined with desolate roads. You’ll walk like the maids do. From villa to villa, a plastic trough full of cleaning products in one hand, the other hand wiping your brow.

  Which you do endlessly until you’re sure there isn’t a stitch of eye shadow left on your lids. Nothing happens. No one looks at you. No one notices you. Nobody recognizes you or calls out to you with a big smile on their face to buy you a drink, and nobody takes your arm in theirs and makes aimless small talk to maintain the circle of friendship. You’re getting hungry. Screw those carrots, you should have eaten three hot dogs instead!

  And you realize you’ve let the day get away and it’s too late now to find a way to the lowlands. You’re not prepared for that. You at least need a water bottle or a ride of some sort. You decide to walk in the other direction, the eastern part of the island is flatter. The names of the villages there are like saints.

  Walking calms you. Gives you time to think about your past and your future. You don’t want to dwell on the here and now, it’s too wide open, too loose, there are no borders to cling to.

  As you approach a village called Saint Francis you feel your step lightening, your body becoming airy. You go freely into places you wouldn’t normally go. You go along walkways that are broken and overgrown, narrow green paths lined with random things: arrangements of driftwood, potted palms with cracks and dirt spilling out, geckos, dogs, faded clothing left behind. Your eyes are bright and alert, opened wide onto plots with fences painted red and turquoise. Looks your way are mixed: the men and women, sweeping walkways or busying about their properties, call out to you or say nothing. You’ve let your posture go a little. With your sweat and rumpled dress you feel you blend in. But of course you don’t.

  “Hey lady,” one calls, casually.

  Another looks at you as if it’s curious that you are there. But not really. Not curious enough to stare.

  Here you are clearly an outsider, since these are the family lands.

  You keep walking. Children playing a game push past you. You’ve been ambling up a mountain road and haven’t seen a car in ages, when one finally comes cranking and chugging along little faster than your walk. As it inches by, something about the passenger catches your eye. The shape of his head is familiar, you recognize the profile as he turns to the driver. He is laughing, speaking another language. You see now it is him: the young man. He doesn’t recognize you. The car passes on by.

  Where it heads it is much cooler. You are wandering the young man’s way, not following him.

  When something else catches your attention. A thin bright green snake goes steadily over the cracked mud of the road. Ordinary for it to be there, except that as you approach, the snake slows down, loiters at the base of tree, no longer hunting for a nest of lizards or mice, but rather stalling by curling this way and that without apparent purpose. When it finds a post from which to inspect you, you meet eyes. Then you are following the snake as it moves gracefully towards a dense area of palms, behind which are shadowed houses held in by a splay of pathways barely wide enough for a car.

  / / /

  Night catches up to you. You were daydreaming, sitting on a stump watching the hypnotic uniformity of the jungle, the slow turn from brilliant green to the colour of a hunt at dusk.

  Yellow lamps light up in the small houses, and you hear footsteps, the sound of family members coming home for supper. Pots banging, the din of cooking, the talk of what happened that day. You feel the urge to listen and be part of it.

  Without thinking you walk a path that leads straight to where the young man is. How you know it’s him you have no idea, but sure enough you are leaning against the wooden slats of a house, out of view. You hear soothing music, then his distinctive voice. His outsider tone separates him and yet you sense he is more than welcome.

  “So you’ve come back to claim your acres.”

  “I have.”

  “It’s here for you, you know that. All you have to do is take it, choose it.”

  “I’m truly grateful, I am.”

  The sounds of smoking, someone rocking nearby with a baby.

  “Always and forever these lands are just waiting here, for their family to come find them and build something. What will you build?”

  Silence. You sense the young man leaning over.

  “The land is foreign to me still.”

  “You were born here. Right here in this very house. That’s why.” Chuckling. “The house remembers you! It’s called you back from your other place.”

  “Well that’s where I live now. Where I have to stay.”

  “You’ll see. You’ll see. Tomorrow we’ll go make the tour, find you a good house plot where you’ll be happy and bring your wife to come back to.”

  Something in your heart plummets southward. His voice murmuring neither yes nor no.

  You edge deftly away from your eavesdrop feeling mercurial, heavy and light at the same time. You retrace your steps through the tangle of roads until you come out to the main road. Compared to the cool darkness you came from, this feels like a highway. Your mind is heading beachward as if in a trance, ushered along by the hush of the jungle, and then the large S of the snake appears. As it moves, its rhythm becomes the buzzing shape taking form in your brain. Two perfect arcs intertwined. The life of the island and . . . The snake snaps and you run full-out to the shore, throwing off your clothes and diving in.

  As you skim along the surface of the black, choppy water, you look up to see you are surrounded by boats full of people. All the boats are busy tonight, lights on deck blazing, couples watching the stars, people yelling from one side to the other. You’ve come to assume that there would always be one boat available to you.

  You are losing sight of your plan. You consider squatting on the young man’s land once he leaves. Or, what? To squat on your own land?

  Suddenly tired and deflated, you swim back to shore, to the gold dress you’d tossed on the sand. You shake out your hair and walk to the bar. When you arrive you make the best of yourself in a mirror. Come out, Bunny. The type of man you used to know is there.

  Dark, slick, perfumed. Older. Tactless, with all signs of wealth encumbering his neck and wrists, his small balletic feet in Italian leather slip-on shoes. He is the spitting image of the bastard.

  You amble his way, already holding his eyes, the room seems to have conspired to this, it is cosmic timing, you know before it happens that it will all work even thoug
h it shouldn’t – you aren’t actually his type – and nothing to lose, you arrive at his side:

  “If there is anyone in this bar worth taking home, it’s you, gorgeous.”

  He grins. And falls for it. So much so that he hasn’t even glanced at your bare feet, nor at other things that designate you as slightly trash. Already his meaty hand is on your waist pulling you closer to him.

  You chalk up your success to habit. The hunger to be liked, to be powerful, to be seen, is fading, but you stumble through the motions anyway, walking through a version of your past behaviour, some final vestige of the Bunny power. You have to do it one last time to prove it to yourself that it isn’t the answer.

  “I was just thinking of leaving.”

  You clamber along the pavement to his car, barely held up by his drunken clutch, and agree to go to his place. You whisper in his ear: the promise of other delights, your body at his disposal, your companionship for a night of drugs. All of the above if he wants. You feel mildly shocked that you haven’t heard of him, or seen him before, but there are so many newcomers to the island, an influx you notice only once you’re in the casinos or big restaurants.

  Entering his mint villa, the man ignores you, setting himself directly at his glass dining table, clearing the magazines and papers with a brush of his arm. Backing away with the first glimmer of regret, you watch him from a distance, see him as a hunched-over helmet of shiny, black hair. You keep this circle of black with its thinning centre in view as you amble about his Deco-revival apartment. The single glass of wine in your system inspires you. The reawakening, the shivers the tinkle sounds give you: of diamonds, of crystal, of the sequins on dresses going by you at parties. In the bathroom, you place both hands firmly on the deep vermilion counter. You turn your head from side to side in the bulb-lined mirror, seeing the echoes of your youthful beauty still just-there, when you hear the man call you.

  “Bunny,” he growls from the table. “Where have you gone?”

  You pet the purple ceramic swan where a dry washcloth is resting. “Hey you, I have one just like you at home, but she’s peachy peach.” You cast one last look at the array of women’s cosmetics, perfumes, and brushes, but now they have no appeal, they look dusty and bleak. Objects trapped in another time.

  Then come back to where the man is at the table, slouching with legs wide, do a line of coke that he sets up for you on the hinge of his foldover, just above his pubic hair, his pooch – you grin at him as you inhale the sour waft that puffs out of his unbuckled pants. You do several more lines. Pulling away, with a flip of your hair and a sniff, you watch him as he eases back into his chair. He’s busy tipping back his bourbon glass until all you see is his throat. You feel your neck grow long, you turn towards the alcove of a room far off in the house, you can see it there, some other deep shade of orange, the walls pixelated by serious mirrors lined up like swords. His arrogance, his open shirt which emits imported perfumery and sparse, unruly chest hair, his messy slaps on your ass – it is all familiar.

  “Champagne is what we want!” he yells out, slapping the table. “Darling Bunny gorgeous, my new friend,” he reaches out for you. Misses. Laughs. “Why don’t you go get us a bottle and serve it up like you would have for the playboys?” he says as he takes another swig from his half-empty of bourbon, and gestures towards a dark hall. You grin at him, feeling detached but game. Barefoot you go, happy to be high and walking away from him. The cases of champagne are stacked in an empty room. They release a gentle clinking memory that streams up inside you: of too many bottles in the arms of the bastard as he’d enter the room yelling, “Tonight we celebrate!” Of endless supply. Easing one out of the stuffing brings on a surge of glory. Back you go to the table on tiptoes, pretending you’re wearing the requisite three-inch Bunny heels. But he isn’t there. You find the kitchen and open the bottle and place it on a tray with two flutes. You wander like that, still on tiptoes, balancing a tray of champagne on one hand, pretending to smoke with your other, when you hear a whistle. It’s him. Upstairs it seems, ordering you to come.

  “You’re actually going to whistle for me? Jesus.” Something new in you doesn’t like this. But you play along because it’s his game, ultimately, until you win him over. As you walk through the house, breathing in the crisp smell of wealth, the devil in you rises up again.

  “Bunny’s back,” you whisper, pinging the flute of one of the glasses against the bay window that overlooks the sea. “Cheers.” A meaningful sound of response: a barrage of nearby waves. You feel the pulse of the ocean pulling you towards that small opening in the window when a warm wet mist hits your face, creating a precise longing to be naked in those waters. But you tear yourself away. “Coming,” you say softly, in no particular direction.

  You enter the bedroom soundlessly and see your man laid out, face-up, on his giant round bed. A reddish glow from the mini chandelier augments the pinkness of his skin, the rise of hairless pouches and folds on his chest. He seems to have half-stripped down, resting one hand on his limp cock, then passed out.

  You set down the tray on the lip of the divan (in the shape of real lips), pour yourself another glass, and stand there looking around at the room, ready now to approach him. You had looked forward to sleeping on a real bed, and forging new alliances, but now the man looks uncannily dead to you, and as you creep closer along the white carpet and let the tips of your nails graze his face near his mouth, you strain to feel for his shallow breath. It’s barely there. The bubbly stings your throat as you take sip after sip, watching him like a hawk. Now you don’t want him to wake.

  You want to pour champagne all over him and his bed. To straddle him with your heavy legs and bite his neck way too hard so he screams. To squeeze his hips with your thighs as a small trickle of blood stains the seam of his white shirt at the collar, to pull his head back by the measly hairs that crown the bald spot. You fucked me over, you bastard. Nails digging into his chest, making welts, his eyes snap open wide with surprise. It makes his cock hard to be dominated. But you slam your hand over his eyes, gripping and kneading the skin at his face the same way you do with your other hand on his cock. Don’t move bastard. But he extends his arm, ever so slowly, afraid. “I see you bastard, whatcha doin’?” You allow his hand to drift over to the other side of the bed where it flips a switch that sends the bed into a roar of invisible electronics. The bed begins to turn like a parade float. You grin. Watch him bleed. Bend down and rub your face into the blood so it smears, so you can smell it. Come. Come get him. Even if I love him. Love him. Hate him. Want him. Hate him. Love him. You are whispering now, chanting. The rancid scent of his blood makes you want more. Makes you hungry. Your tongue is dripping with blood-striated saliva. Sparkly lights from the ocean penetrate the bedroom. You watch him dully, almost dead-eyed. Everything glistens now cool and wet with the saltwater pouring from both your bodies. The room is circling with dizzying speckled lights, then his cum is spurting and with that you shake the champagne bottle, wasting it, screaming out a low-pitched moan.

  At that moment his eyes open for real. They are so clear you think he must have been waiting there, quietly watching you the whole time. The champagne sizzles icily all over the bed. It lubricates your skin so you slither one thigh off of him. You want to get out of here, but now the man has reared up onto his hands. You watch streams of white rivulet to a V at his dick. He flips you over, pins you down, but you are too wired to be held by him, and without a thought, you rise to your knees, push your ass against his belly then bang the bottle against his head. The sound is dull and the bottle doesn’t kill him.

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake . . . alright you bitch.” And he falls back onto the bed, moaning gently, rubbing the thicker portions of his black hair over and over into a dark red mat, until he grabs the bottle himself and cracks it against the side of your face. The blood cascading from your temple, down the entire side of your body, only gives you strength. Not yet, bastard. And like an animal you back away on the b
ed, watching his every move until he goes still and you hear him snore and snort in fits.

  Your first few steps – the blood has gone all the way down to your foot – leave mulish red prints until gradually, as you tiptoe back through the house, retracing your steps, they stamp sticky and random. On your way along the hall, there is a pastel room where you see a fresh bouquet. Red roses. And an open closet. Oh, yes, a woman lives here. Wanting to look, to take things – it occurs to you you should steal money at least, but that thought goes straight out of your head. Money hasn’t been necessary or relevant to your survival. Still, you look through the closet. Fancy women’s clothes, rows of extravagant heels. The wooden hangers crash as you swat through the dresses. Into a small bag you stuff something red and silk and toss in a pair of shoes. You wind a scarf around your head to staunch the blood still trickling from your temple.