The Rabbit Hutch

by Tess Gunty

human tenderness was not to be mocked. It was the last real thing.

“The trouble is that if you’re a young woman, you can’t opt out of the systems of economic production. Nobody can, not really, but at least a white man like you can approximate opting out. A woman can’t even sort of opt out, no matter how hard she tries, because her body contains goods and services, and people will try to extract those goods and services with or without her permission. How could you understand?

at the end of the day, our nuclear and democratic safety is being determined by an international pissing contest, and when you’ve been in foster care, you just…whatever. We think we want to kill each other, but what we really want to kill is the cage.

I mean we don’t want to infantilize ourselves, but what is consent? ‘We’ voted for these maniacs; was that not consensual? To what are we consenting, exactly?

We were cogs in a superstructure of class and state and production and distribution and legislation and political pyramids and militias and exchange rates and national debts and fossil fuels and stuff. We were stuck in a web of material relations.

she tries not to enjoy these things, but her brain and her heart are not calibrated to the same moral system, and she is so tired of contorting her emotions to fit her principles.

Reconstruction is inevitable—he accepts this—and there’s no rebirth without death.

Puberty was a time of mysterious anguish and constant humiliation. Why am I visible? he wondered every day.

The magnitude of her ambition is what prevents her from trying.