The Rabbit Hutch

by Tess Gunty

she had become intimately acquainted with the kind of feelings that she once ogled like jewels on other people’s necks. Security, fulfillment, euphoria. Love. These feelings, she discovered, could last until they became conditions.

Vacca Vale is a city designed for cars, not for people, but Blandine hopes that she can force it to become walkable by inventing and asserting her pedestrian rights on a regular basis.

And who hasn’t fallen for capitalism? Of course it seduces you before it mauls you. Of course it intoxicates you out of your senses before it leads you to the arena.

We were not two people simply succumbing to inconvenient, taboo, totally hackneyed attraction. 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. I think, actually, at the end of the day, we were the answer to the question: Who are grand pianos for?

Against her will, she reacts to James’s attention like an iguana to a heat lamp.

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.

I kept your fucking secret because I mistook it for mine.”

Why am I visible? he wondered every day.

Goat, boy, neighbor, stranger, rabbit, falcon, logger, tree, orphan, mother—as she exits herself, she is all of it.

Is the video any of her business? Sapphire has a hard time determining what obligations she has to the people she encounters, and what obligations they have to her.

I tried to give you an explanation. Instead you wanted the facts.

Todd vomited. The goat peed. The body bled.

It takes so little time and effort to become accustomed to luxury, but years of labor to reverse the process.

They are elite, climate-controlled, dentally supreme.

“How are any of us related?” demands Joan. Her tone is weird, and she knows it. She has suffered some psychological earthquake, and the vials that previously kept her associations from contaminating each other have shattered. “Does it matter?”

Huddled together, these endangered young villains are hulking, awkward, and watchful. The chicks will be killers one day soon, Joan knows, but it won’t be their fault. For now, they’re helpless, at the mercy of the creature who brought them into this place, condemned to wait for someone more powerful to feed them.