The Rabbit Hutch

by Tess Gunty

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.

Not nice, but kind.

It is our duty to endure alienating discomfort, and, toward the end of our preordained missions, singular pain. Our lives will not be breezy. Our condition will isolate us from family and friends. It will render contemporary structures of happiness ridiculous, unattainable, or both. This is our Toll, and it is one we embrace because we know that our condition also unlocks the affected consciousness to nirvana. As my grandmother used to say: your gift is your cross.

When the sexual misconduct of a powerful man is revealed on the news, I feel such intense sadness, it makes me fall asleep.

You are pathologically porous, you inhabit every emotion you see, and you may be a prophet, but if you are, you’re a late bloomer because no prophecies have descended upon you yet, so you’re just roaming the desert in burlap, scratching yourself and screaming like a lunatic.

He’s on the verge of transcendence, can feel it building inside him like an orgasm. Or maybe it won’t be transcendence; maybe it will be a panic attack.

These are your only minutes.

she’s not going to contact the Divine, she might as well go outside.

The Foxconn factory manufactures devices for the world’s most powerful technology companies. Before his or her first shift, each factory employee must formally pledge not to commit suicide.

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

Overhead, a plane drones a cello D through the clouds.

She is disappointed by the domesticity of her adult fantasies but also cheered by it. Domesticity, at least, is achievable.

Blandine loves the mystics because they, unlike her, never stopped searching for portals. They treated prayer as a getaway car, cathedral as rabbit hole, suffering as wonderland, divine ecstasy as the cyclone that delivered a woman to color.

“Sorry,” James murmurs automatically, but he has the look of a scolded pet who doesn’t know what he’s done wrong.

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.

She can practically feel her hypothalamus—neurological tyrant!—powering down her prefrontal cortex.

look, we were concepts rather than individuals, is what I’m trying to say. Idiotic ions within a geomagnetic storm, you see?

Observing James, Blandine is reminded of a swan she saw last February. It had resigned itself to a puddle in the parking lot of a megastore.

The man with the perfect hair says permutations of the same sentence over and over, until another pundit cuts him off.

Joan wants to say: I don’t have an emergency contact, either. She wants to say: I’m glad they didn’t kill you. She wants to say: I am sorry for every instance I took when I could have given.