The Rabbit Hutch

by Tess Gunty

Invisible and eternal things are made known through visible and temporal things.

On a hot night in Apartment C4, Blandine Watkins exits her body. She is only eighteen years old, but she has spent most of her life wishing for this to happen. The agony is sweet, as the mystics promised.

Knife, cotton, hoof, bleach, pain, fur, bliss—as Blandine exits herself, she is all of it. She is every tenant of her apartment building. She is trash and cherub, a rubber shoe on the seafloor, her father’s orange jumpsuit, a brush raking through her mother’s hair. The first and last Zorn Automobile factory in Vacca Vale, Indiana. A nucleus inside the man who robbed her body when she was fourteen, a pair of red glasses on the face of her favorite librarian, a radish tugged from a bed of dirt. She is no one. She is Katy the Portuguese water dog, who licked her face whenever the foster family banished them both in the snow because they were in the way. An algorithm for amplified content and a blue slushee from the gas station. The first pair of tap shoes on the feet of a child actress and the man telling her to try harder. She is the smartphone that films her as she bleeds on the floorboards of her apartment, and she is the chipped nail polish on the teenager who assembled the ninetieth step of that phone on a green factory floor in Shenzhen, China. An American satellite, a bad word, the ring on the finger of her high school theater director. She is every cottontail rabbit grazing on the vegetation of her supposedly dying city. Ten minutes of pleasure igniting between the people who made her, the final tablet of oxycodone on her mother’s tongue, the gavel that will sentence the boys to prison for what they’re doing to Blandine right now. There is no such thing as right now. ...

As excited about this opening as STW's Bernie impression on DRUKs2. Hoping for the opposite outcome!

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.

based

sobbing about how frightened she was, frightened of everything, an everything so big it was essentially nothing, and the nothing swallowed her, swallowed everything.

Motherhood shrouded in a sacred blue veil, macabre details concealed from you, an elaborate conspiracy to trick Catholics into making more Catholics.

The coincidental nature of all social collision has always troubled the mother, even before she was a mother. 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.

The mother braces for a feeling that never arrives. It’s as though she’s underwater, and the news exists above her, on a dock. “Oh,” she finally says. “Sad.”

“Babies know that just because you have it easy doesn’t mean that life is easy.”

She hesitates. Her husband believes that she is a good mother, a normal person, a worthy investment. “I’m scared….”

Blandine is sick of cartoon villains. She prefers her villains complex and nuanced. Disguised as heroes.

She attaches her gaze to the machines, obviously longing for a return to the standard script, which demands nothing of strangers in public spaces but the exchange of a few half-smiles, to indicate that you won’t knife each other.

“You don’t need evidence when you have faith,” answers Joan. Then she blushes. “Right, right. Faith is predicated upon an absence of evidence.” Blandine pauses. “But I always found that a bit awful of God. To withhold evidence, if the Cosmic Egg is so important. That’s how Hildegard von Bingen puts it—the Cosmic Egg. But yeah, it’s suspiciously stingy to give us nothing but a couple of self-professed messiahs every three thousand years. Prophets whose stories don’t align. Mary on toast. Somebody’s cured muscular dystrophy. It’s a lot to ask of us without collateral, don’t you think? Especially when there are so many competing stories, and the stakes are so high. Inferno or paradise. Forever.”

I think that we see whatever we fear, whatever we want. We look at the world, absorb thirty percent of its data, and our subconscious fills in the rest.”

She always knew that she was too small and stupid to lead a revolution, but she had hoped she could at least imagine one. She takes a deep breath, attacked by an awareness of how impossible it is to learn and accomplish all that she needs to learn and accomplish before she dies. She’s spiraling down thoughts of the albedo effect and the positive correlation between climate change and most mass extinctions on the geologic record when Joan drops her detergent cap.

Blandine touches her neck, upset to find it there. “No.”

“It’s like what Simone Weil says. ‘To know that this man who is hungry and thirsty really exists as much as I do—that is enough, the rest follows of itself.’ Simone was a bona fide mystic.” Blandine bites her nail. “What’s the rest, I wonder.”

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

In September, the city suffered a 1,000-year flood, which caused over $3 million in damage, exacerbated by the 500-year flood that occurred just a few months before.

An act of aggression like this is a threat to us all. We’re here to help and protect this town—to foster community—and this was, like, the antithesis of that.”

In the spotlight of direct attention, she becomes conscious of behavior programmed to operate unconsciously, like breathing and eye contact. She stares too long or not long enough, blinks too often or too little, inhales at irregular intervals, yawns in moments of suspense.

Joan needs to blink but worries that this would be a creepy time to do so. Her eyes water.

Supplement therapy with boxing lessons. Energy can neither be created nor destroyed.

The more attractive the stranger, the greater the imperative to use a condom.

The streets you walk, the food you eat, the job you work, the method of transportation you choose, the beauty products you purchase, the shows you watch, the links you click, the way you sit on a train, the way you speak to waiters, the way you take your coffee—everything affects everyone. Find a way to believe this, even when sober.

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

Listen to me very closely: being looked at is not the same as being seen.

Suddenly, it was a Friday in the four o’clock range, two weeks before my death—my most loathed hour. A purgatorial hour, neither afternoon nor evening, too early to eat and too early to drink, an hour that encourages its hostages to tally up their failures, an hour that portrays one’s entire life as a parking garage. I stared at my phone.

No one bothered him. They just let you loiter, he says. Like a dream. All these cubes of clashing, imaginary houses, side by side, making no sense together.

ruhet in frieden

What is she thinking? Can she mourn or yearn? Hers is the kind of presence that registers as an absence. Motherly.

Moses checks his phone the way a regular person would.

“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.

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.

The roads, the unwalkability, their hard and friendly R’s. Sweet gas station clerks. The faith and anger and geometry. All highways and God. Moses only understands contemporary politics when he’s in the Midwest.

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.

Gaspard de la Nuit

Beneath the tree, a young woman cuffs her jeans and laughs into her phone. Tiffany studies her like an anthropologist. Unlike Tiffany, the laughing woman is real. Whomever she’s speaking to speaks back like they want to, and Tiffany envies her. She wonders if there’s a word for the opposite of solipsism, wonders if such a term could accurately describe her psychological disorder.

A lavender sky lights up, gestures wearily toward the future.

That a place called Lover’s Hollow existed within a place called Chastity Valley gave Blandine some hope about human resilience in the face of human brutality.

white rabbit by the scruff of its neck. Taken in sum, the graffiti on the Zorn factories looks just like the internet. Look at me, everyone says when no one’s looking.

baptized in binary waters of worship and disgust. You’re perfect. You’re doing everything wrong. Hush. Speak up. You’re clever. You pretty little idiot. Show us your dance. Hold still. Give us a song. Be quiet. Imitate. Be an original. You’re just like her, and her, and her. Dazzle us. Don’t draw attention to yourself. All eyes on you. You’re not the center of the universe. You’re perfect. What’s wrong with 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.”

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.

She always felt perversely good during a crisis; a crisis justified the panic that rattled the cage of her body at least once a month. Made her feel normal. During a crisis, everyone was plunged into the animal fear that she frequented all year round.

They have been graced with an extravagant capacity to feel, a conduit to imaginative empathy, and it is their celestial duty to exercise this capacity, never to numb or ignore it. This is their operating philosophy. Moses has heard vegans make similar arguments about the human obligation toward nonhuman animals—if you have been endowed with consciousness, you must instrumentalize it to curtail the damage you inflict on the world—an attitude that Moses finds sympathetic but ultimately absurd. It is draining enough, he thinks, to summon compassion for the nonedible animals of this planet.

Listen to me. Honestly people, listen to me. There is nothing after this, ok? So don’t live like you have an Act III. There is no surprise footage after the credits roll. Same goes for everyone you love. I can’t reveal how I know this, I had to sign an NDA, you just have to trust me. These are your only minutes. What are you going to do with them?

Upon the unwrapping of each package, she vows to write a thank-you letter to Aunt Tammy—a letter of the handwritten, thick-papered, thesaurus-consulted variety—but every day following, Joan “forgets.” She “forgets” for so many consecutive days that the idea of a thank-you letter begins to gain weight in her mind, becoming too heavy to lift. By the end of the first week, a mass of gratitude and shame has accumulated inside her body and grown so dense that adequately transcribing it, surely, would take a lifetime. It would bruise both writer and reader. To send a thank-you letter now, she believes by week two, would be like mailing a handwritten account of my indolence, my boorishness. I can’t. I can’t.