The Rabbit Hutch

by Tess Gunty

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.

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.

Blandine sighs. She always knew that she was too small and stupid to lead a revolution, but she had hoped she could at least imagine one.

“Well, Joan, between you and me, I’m giving mysticism a go, myself. I think I have a real shot. From what I can tell, theism isn’t a necessary prerequisite. All I want is to exit my body.”

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.

Men don’t scare her. Nobody scares her. Nobody can break into you if you break out of your body first.

The moment Blandine felt most alive, she was nothing but a variable. The rage shovels her out of herself, like it’s mining her for something to burn.

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.

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