The Rabbit Hutch

by Tess Gunty

when so much weather is raging inside you, and Twitter is cawing the news. Gunfire, murder, oil spill, terrorism, wildfire, abduction, bombing, floods. Funny video in which a woman opens her car to find a brown bear sitting in the driver’s seat snacking on her groceries. Murder, murder, war. The internet is upset. To experience reality as a handful of tap water, at a time like this, is to find oneself in good company. The baby blues—could they be like this? Neon and shrieking?

wonders if the night’s impending activity will reveal her to be a moral or immoral person.

Sometimes, Moses Robert Blitz—only child of Elsie Jane McLoughlin Blitz—paints his entire body with the liquid of broken glow sticks, forcibly enters the house of an enemy, and wakes the enemy. Then he flails around in the dark, naked and aglow.

On her back, in his bed, all she experienced was molten rapture.

how much like a sneeze unsneezed it feels.

If there was anything unethical about our arrangement, wrote Blandine, it wasn’t that you were a teacher and I was a student, or that you were the director and I was the actress, or that you were married and I was a kid, or that you were rich and I was poor, or that you were a father and I was an orphan, or that you were forty-two and I was seventeen. It was the fact that this was always going to mean infinitely more to me than it meant to you, and you fucking knew it from the start.

machine gun. Angel wings. A falcon wearing an American flag as a cape. A marijuana leaf, grinning. legalize happiness, says the leaf. get a job, someone wrote in response. A poster depicting a fetus between two burger buns. obama burger, it says. The pope with an anti-Semitic speech bubble. Many cocks. Many hearts. Many initials. Messages and symbols of manifold xenophobia. A peace sign. A red rabbit wearing a crown and a despotic glare, nine feet tall, holding a smaller white rabbit by the scruff of its neck.

Walking deeper inside the church, he inhales as long as he can. He smells marriages, baptisms, funerals. Incense and bouquets. Beginnings and endings. He wants bacon. The architecture is gothic on a budget, with red carpet, a powder blue ceiling, dark wooden pews, stained glass, and a tabernacle that kindles Moses’s nostalgia for monarchies. An organ looms in the upper wing like a bouncer, and he feels the crawl of surveillance, as he often does; he scratches his skin.

“Sometimes I cover my entire body with the liquid of broken glow sticks and break into the houses of my enemies,” Moses blurts.

“There’s a rot at the center of the Catholic Church,” murmurs Father Tim, “and I thought I could effect change from the inside, but instead, all I feel is infection. I’m starting to smell the rot on myself. Especially when I’m alone. This collar is starting to choke me. Physically choke me. I feel cold, and damp, and gone, and God won’t talk to me. God never talks to me. In all my years of prayer, God has never once called me back.”

Suddenly, she understands why people kill each other. Blinded by the worst neurotransmitter chemicals, anger pitching through her body, she approaches the driver’s door without a plan. To her surprise, a toddler dozes in the backseat.

Blandine recently learned that white barn owls reflect moonlight off their feathers to temporarily blind the voles they are hunting. Everybody does the best she can with the resources she has.

For a hundred years, it has survived as itself.

Overhead, a plane drones a cello D through the clouds. Blandine wants to scoop a cupful of sky and gulp. The park is so verdant, it looks like a screensaver. She applies a cheap rose lip balm and inhales the scent of baking dirt. Lies on her belly and examines each petal as a bee drinks, its stinger drooping like a burden. The

She starts to dream of an American political revolution, but trips over the logistics and tables the matter.

Sapphire has a hard time determining what obligations she has to the people she encounters, and what obligations they have to her.

How unfair that the materials of such an immaterial person would prove as essential for her as they are for everyone else.

She wants to say: I am sorry for every instance I took when I could have given.