The Rabbit Hutch

by Tess Gunty

Like many men who have weathered female rejection, the man in Apartment C12 believes that women have more power than anyone else on the planet. When evidence suggests that this can’t be true, he gets angry. It is an anger unique to those who have committed themselves to a losing argument.

But did anyone ever tell them what would happen when you pushed the fetus out of your body and into the world? No. It was “beautiful.” It was “natural.” Above all, it was a “miracle.” Motherhood shrouded in a sacred blue veil, macabre details concealed from you, an elaborate conspiracy to trick Catholics into making more Catholics.

taken, he holds her hands, her gaze, her pain. “I wish I could take it,” he says. “I wish I could take it all from you and put it into myself.”

He wants this, he tells her. He wants the gore; he wants four in the morning; he wants the beginning and the middle and the end; he wants to fix whatever he can fix and be there through the rest; he wants the bad and the good; he wants the sickness and the health. “I want you,” he says. “Every you.” He calls her a goddess. A hero. A miracle.

Despite the absence of her particular condition online, the mother reasons, it is not so freakish to mortally fear your own baby’s eyes,

What is it about her baby’s eyes? They are too round. Permanently shocked. The baby catalogues each image with an expression of outrage, inspecting the world as though he might sue it.

To have a nationality, a lover, a family, a coworker, a neighbor—the mother understands these to be fundamentally absurd connections, as they are accidents, and yet they are the tyrants of every life.

If you want to understand the human condition, pay close attention to infants: the stakes are simultaneously at their highest, because you could die at any moment, and at their lowest, because someone bigger is satisfying every need. Language and agency have not yet arrived. What’s that like? Observe a baby.

In Hope’s mind, Elsie Blitz was forever frozen at the age of eleven—the age of Susie Evans in the series finale. It had been so nice to know that at least one person in the world would never have to grow up.

“He’s…” Not big. He’s tiny, she wants to scream. He needs to be rescued from his own smallness, like everyone else!

Will her busted vagina ever resume its life as a pussy? Where did the dead mouse land after she flung it out of their window? Where is that man she saw at the drive-through, and what is he doing right now? Is this the most valuable work of her life? Is she a psychopath? Is she a threat to them all?

“We should’ve tried something different,” says Ida. “One of those barefoot schools. Piano lessons. Vitamins. No gluten. None of the kids turned out right.”

“Well, what would they do that for?” he asks reasonably.

“Who am I to say? Laziness. Selfishness. Socialism.

“Why can’t you let it go?” asks Reggie. There are some questions spouses ask each other over and over for decades, starring a fatal flaw that one has perceived in the other. Between Reggie and Ida, this is one such question. “Why can’t you let anything go?”

She wants to stop haranguing this poor woman, but she feels like she’ll drown in a current of her own terrifying energy if she stops talking. “I’ve been reading about Catholic female mystics lately,” Blandine says. “Oh?” “Do you know much about them?” “No.” “They loved suffering,” says Blandine. “Mad for it.”

“I’m not sure I believe in God.” Joan removes her glasses and massages a lens with her long skirt. “Reading can be a nice pastime.”

But the mystics—the ones Blandine admires—they didn’t get out much. They viewed solitude as a precondition of divine receptivity. Most spent their lives essentially alone.

There’s no way to overthrow the system without going outside and making some eye contact. No matter how small your carbon footprint, you can’t simply forgo food and comfort and sex all your life and call yourself ethically self-sacrificial.

In order for her life to be considered ethical, thinks Blandine, she must try to dismantle systemic injustice. But she doesn’t know how to do that.

Blandine sighs. She always knew that she was too small and stupid to lead a revolution, but she had hoped ...

“You don’t seem eighteen.” This accusation depresses Blandine more and more each time it is leveled against her. “I don’t know how else to seem,” she mutters. “You just…you don’t sound like you’re eighteen.” You can’t exist, the world informs Blandine daily. You’re not possible.

They sit in silence. Blandine forces herself not to say anything, hoping that Joan will engage with the mystics’ fetishization of suffering. Perhaps Joan’s just reflecting. But soon it becomes clear that Joan is waiting for the topic to pass, like a flash of hail. Loneliness grips Blandine with the force of a puppeteer.

“Huh.” Blandine tucks the library book back in her bag. “Well, Joan, between you and me, I’m giving mysticism a go, myself. I think I have a real shot. From what I can tell, theism isn’t a necessary prerequisite. All I want is to exit my body.” Joan coughs. “Ah.” “I think we should all take each other a little more seriously.” A pause. “Perhaps,” whispers Joan.

“Sometimes I walk around, bumping into people, listening to them joke and fight and sneeze, and I don’t believe anyone is real. Not even myself. Do you know what I mean?”

“I’m glad we met,” says Blandine. “Strange to remain strangers with your neighbor, don’t you think?”

“We’re all just sleepwalking. Can I tell you something, Joan? I want to wake up. That’s my dream: to wake up.”

Abandoning her load of blues, she exits the laundromat and slips into the evening as though trying not to wake

In general, she feels too much or too little, interacts too much or too little—never the proper amount.

Whenever she’s forced to provide a Defining Characteristic during a corporate ice breaker, she reveals that she has freckles on her eyelids but nowhere else. Group leaders always demand that she prove it. After she closes her eyes, at least two good-natured strangers make comments like, Oh my, or, I’ll be damned, or, Very nice. Joan never feels closer to anyone afterward, never feels like a defined character, and doesn’t understand why people are so eager to break the ice.

Joan works at Restinpeace.com, Where Life Lives On, screening obituary comments for foul language, copyrighted material, and mean-spirited remarks about the deceased. “You would be surprised,” she often tells people, “by how cruel people can be to the dead.”

Joan has never confidently traversed a crosswalk in her life, and she profoundly distrusts people who claim they don’t like bread.

Anne Shropshire closes her eyes and flares her nostrils. It is interesting for Joan to see patience expiring in real time.

To stave off an anxiety attack, Joan is breathing to the beat of “Ave Maria.”

Do not let your children become casualties of your damage. Do not have children if you cannot ensure the above.

An Open Letter to My First Husband: Although I forgive you for the incredible pain you inflicted upon my young and tender heart, I am glad we never reproduced. You mugged my twenties. It is shocking to me that you are still alive.

I insist that you quit your bizarre charade. Don’t be surprised, Moses. Of course I know of it. If there’s one thing money can buy, it’s surveillance.

Listen to me very closely: being looked at is not the same as being seen. If I can teach you anything before I die, let it be that.

Because one day you will die, I promise, and mortality does not care if you believe in it.

But if we’re lucky, we are furthest from childhood at the end of our lives. If we’re lucky, we are closest to our parents, but they evade us until it’s officially over. What we get instead of these comforts is a meet-cute with Death. He is always early.

I have never found it easy to distinguish between arousal and a fight-or-flight response.

I have only seen myself three times. Once while observing a female wolf at my hometown zoo. Once at the Temple of the Feathered Serpent in Teotihuacán, Mexico. Once at the fish tank outside of the shoe store in Key West.

“What can I do for you?” asked my assistant. I gave her the destination. She arranged a journey to my beloved sloths and held my hand on my plane as she wept. I told her to pull herself together. I told her I wanted an American flag in the room where I would die. Billowing white veil.

I love best in snow, and I sing best in stairwells, and I pee best on trains. Sometimes I make a pile of Himalayan pink salt on my palm and lick it, just lick it. When I wear socks to bed, I have the most erotic and transporting dreams. Half my life, I have been waiting for someone to yell: Action. The other half, I have been waiting for someone to yell: Cut. All my life, I have been cute. These conditions make you selfish, and America knows them well.

Then one day you find yourself in a boutique of terminal illness, forced to purchase something in order to use the bathroom, and from then on, you have nothing to think about except a catalogue of the instances you took when you could have given.

He knows that I will not live forever, but I want to tell him that he will not live forever. I want to tell him that everyone—everyone—is wrong about mortality. Across every season of every year, I nursed on summer, but now its milk is dry. I want to tell my son that I am so sorry.

Concluding Remarks on Fame and Death: They’re both so lonely and boring. Bisous, Elsie Jane McLoughlin Blitz

She was beautiful, but in a spooky way. Eyes too far apart. Skin and hair as white as the walls. Graveyard clothes.

We didn’t even notice that the doorframes were flooding—sort of weeping—until the water touched us. It was coming from the roof, I think. I caught Blandine looking at me, then, her face flushed from the drink and her eyes all twinkly, and I felt something. Like waking up.

I think Malik fell for Blandine the hardest, and Todd the softest, and me in the middle. Seemed to me that Todd fell more for Malik than he did for Blandine, but he wanted to fit in, so he started to drool at the sound of her hiccups like the rest of us.