The Rabbit Hutch

by Tess Gunty

Most people are beautiful because they look like the average of everybody else, but Blandine is beautiful because she looks bizarre. Asymmetrical. Scrawny limbs. Something alien about her. A beauty that should be ugly but isn’t. She yawned and said, “Fucking mattress.” And we fell in love.

No one has it easy in the Vacca Vale system, but Blandine had it the worst, being so smart and female. People want things from the Blandines of the system, and I’m sure her brain didn’t help.

She’s the only one of us who didn’t graduate high school, but also the only one of us who would’ve gone to college.

it. If you ever mentioned any kind of school to her, she’d either lecture you about how fucked-up the American education system is or she’d bolt.

There’s something un-American about him that’s tough to describe. Like he belongs to no place. He hates teams. He’s obsessed with raw vegetables. He’s got glass skin. In high school, I’d never seen Todd join any kind of group. Never seen him fired up or ashamed, follow any trend or try to look cool, partake or submit.

They were supposed to go to a museum. Traveled three hours to get there. But as soon as they got to the lobby, Todd broke off, hopped on a bus, and went to Ikea. He had never been to one before, only heard about them. He says he was dying to go. He spent the whole fucking day there. Says he read three comic books in three different family rooms, ate meatballs on a fake terrace, and took a nap on a totally black bed. No one bothered him. They just let you loiter, he says. Like a dream.

No one believed him at first when he told them where he’d been, but when they did believe him, they hated him more. Convincing us you’d been kidnapped or worse, for fucking Ikea? Todd says he’d do it again. It was the best day of my life, he says.

“Well.” He is stung. He is itchy. “Each man is an expert on himself, so—” “Person.” “What?” “Person.” “When I say ‘man,’ I mean ‘mankind,’ ” explains Moses. “Your speech is codified in patriarchal microaggressions.” Moses hates himself.

Ampersand is the only non-chain establishment in Vacca Vale that approximates a coffeehouse. Opened by a pair of optimistic hipsters, it attracts a disproportionate number of people in berets. A vintage botanic wallpaper encloses them—a wallpaper that Blandine loves, most of the time. Today, it makes her feel murderous about deforestation.

What are all these people doing in Vacca Vale, Blandine wonders, and where do they live, and when will they leave? She never sees people like these outside of Ampersand, in the wild.

“Oh okay, no problem!” With his smile, and those jeans, it’s evident to Blandine that no one has ever truly criticized this young man to his face, and that he’s a product of extreme parental love.

Blandine hates this undemanding caricature of sympathy, which so often manifests as pity. She believes it is native to the overly loved and the never-truly-criticized.

He’d be well suited for a men’s deodorant commercial, Blandine thinks: handsome enough to serve as a vessel for positive self-projection, but not so handsome as to threaten the consumer’s personal sense of masculinity. Blandine senses that he has many tattoos, although she can’t see them. He wears his testosterone like a strong cologne.

Customers often wink at Blandine. After the wink, they tend to offer unsolicited, intimate facts about themselves.

Blandine does not enjoy lugging around the secrets of strangers. She wants to transcend herself, wants to crawl out of the grotesque receptacle of her body. How can she accomplish such a thing when strangers treat her as a storage unit for their heaviest information?

“Thanks, sweetheart,” says the father, eyes on her chest again, and Blandine is glad she sneezed on his eggs.

The daughter gives her a stern look, appearing disproportionately huge for a moment, like Jesus in paintings of Madonna and Child.

Three months ago, on a train to visit her aunt Tammy in Gary, Indiana, Joan sat a few seats away from a man who snored louder than she thought possible. Joan felt, for the first time, that she was capable of killing someone.

Joan apologized three more times, then returned to her seat, feeling evil. As usual, when she confronted the world about one of its problems, the world suggested that the problem was Joan.

I know that it was only a fish, and I know that most people wouldn’t feel bad about its death, but that night—bear with me—it was like the fish was teaching me something about my soul. Teaching me that my soul was faulty. I know this is stupid, but it’s what I thought, and I wasn’t even high. I thought the fish was saying: Yes, Jack, you are wicked. Something went wrong inside your machinery, maybe in utero, maybe in childhood, and now you’re wound to the wrong moral time zone, maybe even to the wrong solar system. You, Jack, are coldhearted. And you have no excuse.

One psychologist suggested I was repressing traumatic memories, maybe dissociating, and I wanted to believe him. It would explain how fake everything felt, how lonely and digital. How often I wanted to hurt somebody, just to see if either of us was real, just to move someone’s face around, just for the fucking thrill of it. But two other psychologists told me my childhood passed the smell test. There was no record of abuse in my file. It didn’t sound easy, they assured me, but it didn’t sound so bad. One therapist suggested that I couldn’t remember anything because I smoked too much pot.

What I’m trying to say is, Cathy and Robert never subjected me to the kind of shit that mutates your life forever, the kind that basically every foster kid I know has to take. A girl like Blandine would have faced it from Day One. It’s hard to believe that our hands were dealt from the same deck of cards.

I had a recurring dream that I stood in front of a burning house, and I knew they were inside, and I felt nothing. If I was evil, I had no one to blame.

Blandine observed the fish for a moment, her striking face blank. “Got a—got a bouquet for you.” I could feel my heart in my brain and my blood in my eyes. And then something miraculous happened: she laughed. Laughed. Laughed and laughed, doubled over, crossed her arms over her stomach and squeezed her eyes shut until tears slipped out the creases, and when she finally caught her breath, she put her real hand on my real chest—the first time she’d touched me since the love hit—and I finally understood the phrase time stopped. “Oh God,” she gasped. “That’s a good one.”

But so what if DBP can enhance the capacity of other chemicals to produce genetic mutations? So what if it can cause developmental defects, provoke unwelcome changes in the testes and prostate, reduce one’s sperm count, interfere with hormone functions, and impair fertility? So what if it’s toxic to aquatic organisms and young children, capable of causing liver failure in the latter? None of this bothers Moses Robert Blitz. In no material sense is he a child or an aquatic organism. He has no interest in reproducing and is surely mutated beyond repair already. Besides which, he believes the European Union has a tendency to overreact.

He has never understood the appeal of immortality.

Moses only understands contemporary politics when he’s in the Midwest.

A pair of young women sit beside him, cased guitars at their feet. They could be twins or lovers, he’s not sure, but they have clearly spent years in the same home, stepping over each other to get to their lives. “We have all this stuff, and yet we’re still so sad,” says one to the other. “Why don’t you write a fucking screenplay about it.” “Don’t be a bitch.” “Don’t be a cartoon.” “Of what?” “Of a millennial.” “Your dog is at a spa!”

Moses scrolls through the search engine results, validating his suspicion that Vacca Vale is yet another American blemish—one of those disposable, expired towns responsible for electing the demagogues who reduce their country to a trash fire.

Addicted to learning because it distracts her from the hostility of her consciousness; she has one of those brains that attacks itself unless it’s completing a difficult task.

The teachers like her because she is brainy and tragic. When discussing her among themselves, they call her “less fortunate,” “at risk,” “atypical,” and “gifted.”

It’s true that she is a volcanic actress. She has a gift for performance, reaction, and imitation—instincts cultivated by a childhood of unpredictable caregivers. But it’s the inhuman quality of Tiffany that entrances James most: she is cold and faraway. Otherworldly. Astral.

One evening, she tells a joke that makes him laugh himself breathless, and this is their first mutual shot of serotonin. It’s clear to her that he would be happier in a coastal city. It’s clear to him that she would be happier in a different species. By December, it is clear to both variables that each could capsize the other.

For weeks, other students in the play covet the attention that James reserves for Tiffany, but they temper their suspicion. They know her story. Pity her. Assume that he does, too.

Which makes him laugh, which makes her laugh, their pleasure locked in a positive feedback loop until she feels like her head will pop off and champagne will spill forth, out of her body, into the school.

James and his troupe of gloomy, dramatic teenagers have a five-hundred-dollar budget, no functional sound system, no costume designer, no understudies. But they rehearse as though competing for a Tony.

In the far stall, Tiffany breathes each breath on purpose, because sometimes you have to. He’s just being fatherly, they separately assure themselves, a father to a fatherless girl. But James has misinterpreted Tiffany’s problem: she’s had an overabundance of fathers, not a scarcity.

It goes like this: as the weather gets colder, Tiffany and James play emotional apocalypse by email, script, art, and eye contact—all talk, no touch. She gets to be the world, which makes him the ending. There is no revelation. He orbits her. She spins. Gradually, they become orphaned from their morals, and they feel that something has died, but also that something’s been born. Among everyone Tiffany’s ever met, James takes the most from her, gives her the most. It’s his fault, it’s hers, he isn’t, it doesn’t matter, it matters most.

For months, Tiffany and James fuck without touching. It’s been done before.

If he were a decent man, the decent thing to do would be to offer Tiffany a lift. As it stands, the decent thing to do is to extract himself from her presence as soon as possible.

man gazes at her as he feels up the avocados, his mouth open, and for the first time in her life, she enjoys the sexual attention of a stranger. Go ahead, she thinks. Look at me.

Bok choy, endives, spinach, kale, baby kale, swiss chard, mustard greens, collard greens, micro greens, beet greens, watercress. Salivating, she concludes that she probably has an iron deficiency, but knows she will never schedule an appointment to find out. “Oh, my.” The cashier smiles. “Do you keep rabbits?” The total appears on the screen: two weeks of tips from her job at the diner. Tiffany pays in cash. “Something like that,” she replies.

Three miles away, in a renovated mansion built in the American Queen Anne style 143 years ago by Woodrow Huxley Zorn III, cofounder of Zorn Automobiles, James makes love to his wife for the first time in months, inducing seismic orgasms from them both. But he feels her fall sad afterward, turning from him too soon, abandoning him for her private interiority, which he imagines as the library of a castle they once visited in Ireland, spectacular and haunted and damaged by cannon fire.

he tries to compute why he finds one person’s distance alluring while he finds his wife’s distance funereal.

He does not ask if Tiffany has experience with childcare. Presumes that being female is sufficient qualification for the job.

Prior to this evening, Tiffany understood the concept of James’s wife, but not the reality of her. Now she is here, in three dimensions, as real as Tiffany is—probably realer. She has eyebrows, chapped hands, a personality, a master’s degree in public health, a cautious laugh—the laugh of an adult who was constantly hushed as a child. She even has a name. Her name is Meg. Her presence makes Tiffany feel like a prototype of a woman, not the real thing.

All of the children’s toys seem to come from the eighteenth century: no plastic, no batteries, no jingles or flashing lights. Hardcover books stock wall-to-wall shelves; the cats match the furniture; the furniture is surprising. Logs in the fireplace. Mahogany floors. Tiffany treads in this flood of beauty, overwhelmed nearly to tears. She feels like one of those cows in the wake of a hurricane, swimming without a destination, doomed by a task that she was not designed to perform.

That’s when Tiffany notices James ambling down the stairs, tucking an Oxford shirt into navy slacks. Flushed and clean, scruff grown out, hair unkempt, laugh lines pronounced, altogether taller than Tiffany remembered. He devastates her.

Her body reacts to James exactly as it reacts to his house: all this splendor, precisely calibrated to her innermost desires, and none of it will ever be hers.

Tiffany understands, with a force that nearly shoves her to the ground, that she has misinterpreted everything. She is delusional, foolish, disposable, grotesque. Humiliated.