The Rabbit Hutch

by Tess Gunty

Invisible and eternal things are made known through visible and temporal things.

The coincidental nature of all social collision has always troubled the mother, even before she was a mother. To have a nationality, a lover, a family, a coworker, a neighbor—the mother understands these to be fundamentally absurd connections, as they are accidents, and yet they are the tyrants of every life.

On the South Shore, she likes to read Charles Dickens because he pays attention to pollution but also makes her laugh, which makes her feel that it is possible to laugh in her own polluted city.

IF YOU LOVED ELSIE BLITZ AND YOU MISS HER JUST REMEMBER SHE WILL ALWAYS BE THERE BECAUS LOVENEVER DIES. YOULL SEE HER IN A TULIPS AND A SUNSET AND YOULL HEAR HER VOICE IN THE WIND SHE LIVES IN BEAUTY.

She finds the effects of bewitching real estate on her body deeply troubling, and she cannot reconcile it with her budding ideologies about private property. Who allowed this foster kid to give a damn about artisanal furniture? To value hand-knotted rugs like a fucking aristocrat?

“Too many numbers,” mumbled Hope. This couldn’t be what numbers were for. It was irresponsible for math teachers to give students numbers without telling them how to conceptualize them.

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

Joan’s problem, she realizes, is not ingratitude or insensitivity—her problem is extragratitude and oversensitivity. At this thought, one half of her rolls its eyes at the other. She always wants to write long thank-you letters in gorgeous cursive, on expensive stationery. Perfect sentences accompanied by every gesture that might extend one soul to another. The magnitude of her ambition is what prevents her from trying.

this hurt LOL