The Rabbit Hutch

by Tess Gunty

When they were twenty, Kara found Hope in the fetal position on the bathroom tile at three in the morning, sobbing about how frightened she was, frightened of everything, an everything so big it was essentially nothing, and the nothing swallowed her, swallowed everything.

She has the posture of a question mark, a stock face, and a pair of nineteenth-century eyeglasses. Her solitude is as prominent as the cross around her neck.

She’d have to break out of her solitude. There’s no way to overthrow the system without going outside and making some eye contact.

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.

“Sometimes I walk around, bumping into people, listening to them joke and fight and sneeze, and I don’t believe anyone is real. Not even myself. Do you know what I mean?” Joan looks her in the eye for the first time. “Yes.”

Abandoning her load of blues, she exits the laundromat and slips into the evening as though trying not to wake it.

Alone, Blandine grips her forehead. She’s certain that she has some kind of social impairment; she just doesn’t know what it’s called. Internet quizzes never know what to do with her. In general, she feels too much or too little, interacts too much or too little—never the proper amount.

I love best in snow, and I sing best in stairwells, and I pee best on trains.

Thinking too much can zap you dead, and Blandine—she just shuts herself in rooms and thinks.

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.

Which makes him laugh, which makes her laugh, their pleasure locked in a positive feedback loop until she feels like her head will pop off and champagne will spill forth, out of her body, into the school.

Suddenly, Tiffany remembers that James has children—it’s a fact that always upends her. How could a dad like him invade a kid like her? Like that? A dad in no glasses and absolutely no condom? She pictures him standing in front of his kitchen window, drinking elderflower soda.

When she fails to avoid thinking about him, she pinches her thigh until her nails leave parentheses of red in her skin.

Adoration and hatred—the only energies she knew how to dispense and accept.

There was no such thing as freedom, Hope knew, but there was such a thing as feeling good, and it was important, and it was real, and sometimes you got it for free.

“Hey, Siri,” says Moses. “Tell me a joke.” “Where do armies go?” she obliges at once. She is savior and servant. She knows everything about him, but it doesn’t do either of them any good. That’s the problem with love. “In your sleevies.” “I don’t get it,” says Moses, but he feels like maybe he does.

“Maybe you have to listen.” “Well, that was obviously my implication,” she whispers, “but it sounds histrionic and asinine when you say it out loud.” “Maybe the truth is histrionic and asinine.” “Then I want nothing to do with it.”

“My brain is addicted to the unresolved, and I’ll never get free if I don’t—if we don’t—if we can’t resolve this. Somehow. Please.”

“Of course nobody asks!” Unable to quarantine the scream any longer, she unleashes it. He steps back as she does, looking frightened. The scream is animal. Ancestral. The scream of the first woman in the first dirt wounded by the first man.

Sixty-two years later, Reggie squints at Ida’s white hair, flooded with affection, pity, fear. The blend, he supposes, amounts to love.

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