The Rabbit Hutch

by Tess Gunty

In the aftermath, Tiffany picks up more shifts at Ampersand. She legally changes her name to Blandine, after a teenaged martyr who stoically endured public torture at the hands of the Romans. Blandine persuades her foster parents that she needs some time off. She finds a book on female mystics in the library and reads it in one night while drinking Wayne’s Yukon Jack. She borrows two more books and requests a third from their partner branch. The mystics were sick and wonky geniuses, often hilarious, always alone. Hildegard is Blandine’s favorite mystic because she is about a hundred people in one body. Hildegard of Bingen: prophet, composer, botanist, abbess, theologian, doctor, preacher, philosopher, writer, saint. Doctor of the Church. A veritable polymath. She didn’t ask anyone’s permission to be these things, to be everything; she just did it. She was always writing letters to male members of the clergy, telling them to get their act together. They weren’t blowing the trumpet of God’s justice, was the problem. She wrote recipes. The tenth of ten children, she was born to a noble German family who donated her to the Church as a tithe, an alarmingly common practice of the time. Hildegard was born sickly, as the mystics always were, and experienced visions since she was a child but didn’t tell anyone about them until she was in her forties. In her writings, she adopts an annoyingly gendered humility, painting herself as some idiot savant, some silly little woman. This ini...