The Rabbit Hutch

by Tess Gunty

“I’m not dismissing the harm she caused,” says Father Tim. “I’m just trying to understand her. I find that’s the best place to start, no matter how cruel someone seems.”

“Why do you assume that she was protecting me from something? Maybe she wasn’t thinking of me at all, did that occur to you? People are selfish. Sometimes that’s all there is to it. When they seem cruel, they are cruel.”

This man appeared at their house once annually, and Moses had no idea who he was. Moses did, however, hate the man with an intensity that did not correspond to their interactions. It must have been a response to a message only available to his subconscious.

Wistfully, Moses thought of the Christmas Island crab migration, which he learned about in school, and which was also an annual event, and which he would strongly prefer to witness than the Blitz of July. He imagined the female crabs, red and sturdy, marching en masse through the darkness to reach a high-tide beach. He learned that each crab carries a hundred thousand eggs that she must deposit into the sea—a treacherous endeavor because she can’t swim. As soon as the eggs touch the water, they hatch, and the female leaves them to fend for themselves. Could you call such a creature a mother?

“Moses, I want to apologize on behalf of us all,” said Marianne, grinning at him. She was so pretty it was hard for him to determine the sincerity with which she said this, her beauty redacting all other data.

“Marianne, you just act nice because you don’t have a personality. That’s your problem,” he said. “And it’s not your fault—it’s the fault of society. No one ever asked you to develop a personality because you always looked so heavenly. Who can blame you for being nothing but nice? Who among us would have done the hard work of developing a personality if we weren’t forced to?”

“But you should admit that there’s nothing virtuous about niceness, Marianne, especially niceness unaccompanied by a personality.”

Moses felt sorry for her, although even at twelve he knew that he could not trust feelings inspired by the beautiful.

“she asked for more and more and more morphine. The sick truth is that she loved being addicted, loved being a victim, loved feeling oppressed, loved losing control. She loved any excuse to spiral. She wanted to—to leave.”

Moses is surprised by his disappointment—what it reveals. “Honestly,” adds Father Tim, “I think this might be my last day.” “What?” “Of the priesthood.” Moses feels the roles of listener and talker trade places, feels it like a change of a current. “Well—”

“Anyway, I’m surprised I called you good not because I think you’re bad. It would be absurd to describe a whole person as good or bad. You’re just a series of messy, contradicting behaviors, like everyone else. Those behaviors can become patterns, or instincts, and some are better than others. But as long as you’re alive, the jury’s out.”

In the end, there was a woman and a man. But the man was too much son and the woman was too little mother. She would die without him. She needed everything, and the son did not like to look at her. He needed everything, too.

“Moses,” Elsie whispered. “Avenge yourself against me and my motherhood. Don’t forgive me—that’s my fourth request. Please, never, ever, ever forgive me.

that I don’t deserve clemency, even after I die. Even after you die. I was never able—I don’t know why I was never able to—but I just wasn’t—I couldn’t. Even now, I try, and it doesn’t come to me. Motherhood just doesn’t come to me. I’m looking at you, Moses.” Her voice wavered. “My love. My only. Moses, please.”

Manipulation—she had a PhD in it; she could lock you in the pool house for ten hours and make you feel guilty about it; she could do absolutely everything wrong for five decades and still make you cry at her deathbed.

Jack notices with a blend of disappointment and relief that, outside of Apartment C4, Blandine is only a bit prettier than the average girl. He assesses her sallow complexion and knobby limbs, her prepubescent body, her starched white hair, dark at the roots, her lack of ass. Still, there is something hypnotic about her. She emanates the same force he associates with ghosts, extraterrestrials, magic, miracles. He sees her flaws, feels a little repulsed, and yet he can’t kick the enchantment out of his body. It occurs to him that he might actually like her personality.

“I don’t have social media.” “Oh, right.” He rolls his eyes. “Too good for all that.” She shakes her head. “Not at all. On the contrary, I’m too weak for it. I mean, everyone is, but I am especially susceptible to its false rewards, you know? It’s designed to addict you, to prey on your insecurities and use them to make you stay. It exploits everybody’s loneliness and promises us community, approval, friendship. Honestly, in that sense, social media is a lot like the Church of Scientology. Or QAnon. Or Charles Manson. And then on top of that—weaponizing a person’s isolation—it convinces every user that she is a minor celebrity, forcing her to curate some sparkly and artificial sampling of her best experiences, demanding a nonstop social performance that has little in common with her inner life, intensifying her narcissism, multiplying her anxieties, narrowing her worldview. All while commodifying her, harvesting her data, and selling it to nefarious corporations so that they can peddle more shit that promises to make her prettier, smarter, more productive, more successful, more beloved.

It makes me sick. Everybody influencing, everybody under the influence, everybody staring at their own godforsaken profile, searching for proof that they’re lovable. And then, once you’re nice and distracted by the hard work of tallying up your failures and comparing them to other people’s triumphs, that’s when the algorithmic predators of late capitalism can pounce, enticing you to partake in consumeristic, financially irresponsible forms of so-called self-care, which is really just advanced selfishness.

“I just…I want a life that’s a little more lifelike,” Blandine says. “Don’t you?”

To Blandine, Maxwell Pinky doesn’t seem orphaned so much as fundamentally parentless. It’s as though he emerged from the sludge of the Vacca Vale River, a jazzily dressed swamp monster willing to plunder his own home in order to eat. To overeat.

“Also,” he adds, “you’re wrong to say social media is pure evil. Good stuff happens there, too. I follow a lot of activists and stuff. I learn a lot from them—like, ways to talk about things, new ways to think, petitions to sign. All that. Think about all the protests, all the people leading movements around the world. Lots of it wouldn’t have happened without social media.”

“Nothing,” she says. “It’s just—that’s a good look on you.” He clears his throat. “What?” “Expressing an opinion that contradicts the one in front of you. It’s…” She drifts off, blushes harder. “It’s cool.”

Was it possible that education could not only distract Tiffany from the windowless waiting room of her life, but actually liberate her from it?

In Pinky’s sunlit loft, Blandine feels horribly visible, as though she is unclothed. “College isn’t for everyone,” she snaps. “Right,” says Jack. “It’s for people like you.”

“You act like college is some kind of sanctuary. But it’s a system, as corrupt as the rest of them. You can’t just climb up some credits, out of your history, into a better life. You can’t. You’re trapped inside yourself no matter how many degrees you get. College is just another level in the game that oppresses us—oppresses everyone.”

“We can’t leave Vacca Vale,” she finally murmurs, eyes on the fishbowl of political pins. “We’re the only ones who can save it.”

They are both breathing quickly, pumped with a familiar panic—one that arrives the first time two people reach for each other. The kind that says: if you get any closer, you will shatter this.

She can’t look at him right now, but maybe she’ll work up the nerve to tap on his bedroom door tonight. Maybe having a body can feel good; maybe pleasure can be as easy for her as it seems to be for everyone else; maybe this is an intimation. Maybe it’s just the heat.

She was at home in places of humble ugliness. It was the only aesthetic that could hold her without making her nervous; she did not have to worry about deserving it.

He’d teach you to ride a bike, for example, but he wouldn’t be there when you lost a tooth. You would lose twenty teeth, and he’d never be there to take the bloody tissues from your mouth. Not once.

She must’ve been eighty or so. Watching her laborious movements, Hope’s spirit reached toward the woman in sympathy.

His boxers were from high school, torn and covered in cartoon fish. She touched them, felt jealous of them, jealous of how close they got to be to him all day long, even while he was at work. She gulped. Gradually, she realized that Anthony was studying her with concern, his eyes shining, his eyebrows furrowed. “Are you all right?” he asked. He was so luminous she felt he might burn her.

“You are a work of art.” When he said things like this, it always sounded like he meant it, somehow.

For a moment, everything was indigo.

Together, briefly, they became the objects and forces around them, too: the furniture, the power lines, the forest, the factories, the river, the

In the bed, Hope cried pleasurably, as she often did after good sex. Anthony kissed the tears off her face, traced patterns of light that fell on her skin, and told her that it was beautiful to feel so much.

She always thought it would be unethical to create a child who would face environmental doom. And I am so on board with this. I mean, sometimes I do wish I had somebody I could teach chess to, and I find myself smiling at unknown babies, but I agree with Beth—in such a climate, to act on the primal reproductive urge would be selfish.

answered. “I had hoped you would get me a present. Like a tangible present. But I know it’s materialistic and silly and ungrateful and awful and God—I’m the worst.” She winced. “Please forget I said anything. The party is more than I could ask for. I’m being insufferable.”

You have to be careful—if you collide with someone, you must be prepared to reside inside their psychology indefinitely, and this is the burden of a lifetime.

You choose the wrong twenty-something to fuck, and now you’re forced to confront your great capacity for violence when provoked. For the rest of your life, you must live with this knowledge. All because you feel too much!

Exchanges between Joan and Penny have become so frequent over the past few years that Penny has taken to calling Joan “Mama Bangs,” which disturbs Joan, but also feels like friendship. “How’s it hanging, Mama Bangs?”

She feels like a demanding and ill-fated houseplant, one that needs light in every season but will die in direct sun, one whose soil requires daily water but will drown if it receives too much, one that takes a fertilizer only sold at a store that’s open three hours a day, one that thrives in neither dry nor humid climates, one that is prone to every pest and disease. What kind of attention would make Joan feel at home? Who would ever work that hard to administer it? She will never own live houseplants.

The manifestations of this intergenerational neglect are always unpredictable, often funny, never affordable.

As he lulled the passengers with stories, someone began to pass around a Tupperware of sliced watermelon, and a drunk man offered to share the miniature bottles of whiskey from his bag, and Joan felt such overwhelming affection for her species, she feared she would sacrifice herself to save it.

Immediately, two people rushed to the woman’s side, gingerly tending to her, touching her shoulders and face, speaking to her as though she were their mother—a cherished one—and Joan understood that human tenderness was not to be mocked. It was the last real thing.

Miraculous. Joan recalls the existence of dogs, craft stores, painkillers, the public library. Cream ribboning through coffee. The scent of the lilacs near her childhood home. Brown sugar on a summer strawberry. Her father’s recovery from the tyranny of multigenerational alcoholism. The imperfect but true repossession of his life. The euphoria of the first warmth after winter, the first easy breath after a cold, the return of one’s appetite after an anxiety attack. Joan has much to be happy about. She thinks: I am happy, you are happy, we are happy. These thoughts—how she can force herself to have them. Miraculous.

This evening, the streets are cast in shades of inoffensive beige, and there is something morally puny about the sun, something like the person who throws up her hands in the middle of a debate and cries, I don’t take sides! Like apoliticism is possible. Like it’s virtuous!

It’s clear to Blandine from the synchronicity of their movements—the corresponding shuffles of feet, head tilts, and eye squints—that they have been trying to love each other for years.

“You’re beautiful,” he says sadly. Blandine stays very still and upright, tracking the man’s figure as he vanishes from the clearing. When he’s out of sight, she offers her pinkie to a bee, goading it to sting her. It does not.

As a child, Blandine planted several coffee beans in the Valley, hoping one might sprout into the sky. She followed every rabbit she saw, determined to find the warren and plunge into it. Tornado sirens thrilled her, and she was often punished for wandering off from the group at school. She was a fool for portals, willing to sign the thorniest contract—giants, poison, isolation, tricksters, hunters, con-artist wolves, cannibalistic witches, anything—if it promised to transport her. There was no place like home because there was no home. Now an adult in the eyes of the state, she walks over grass and roots and trash, her feet browning with dirt, and dreams of a little housebroken goat, an east-facing bedroom window, an edible garden, a ladder on a book wall, no electricity, a fireplace. She dreams of total self-sufficiency and freedom from the market. She starts to dream of an American political revolution, but trips over the logistics and tables the matter. She is disappointed by the domesticity of her adult fantasies but also cheered by it. Domesticity, at least, is achievable.