The Rabbit Hutch

by Tess Gunty

Blandine is sick of cartoon villains. She prefers her villains complex and nuanced. Disguised as heroes.

personally, I find the engaged-to-Jesus rhetoric creepy as hell, incestuous at best, but it’s quite a phenomenon.

I think that we see whatever we fear, whatever we want. We look at the world, absorb thirty percent of its data, and our subconscious fills in the rest.” Blandine cracks her knuckles. “I’m not sure I believe in God.”

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.

She takes a deep breath, attacked by an awareness of how impossible it is to learn and accomplish all that she needs to learn and accomplish before she dies.

“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?”

Listen to me very closely: being looked at is not the same as being seen. If I can teach you anything before I die, let it be that.

I love best in snow, and I sing best in stairwells, and I pee best on trains. Sometimes I make a pile of Himalayan pink salt on my palm and lick it, just lick it. When I wear socks to bed, I have the most erotic and transporting dreams. Half my life, I have been waiting for someone to yell: Action. The other half, I have been waiting for someone to yell: Cut. All my life, I have been cute. These conditions make

Across every season of every year, I nursed on summer, but now its milk is dry.

In Rock Paper Scissors, pick rock first. Most people choose scissors. This is my most painful tip to relinquish, as its advantage is dependent upon its secrecy, which is why I offer it as reward.

He feels violently white and male in her presence, and he can’t explain why.

You may have been trapped in the system, the fish said to me, but you got lucky—nobody hurt you.

He has never understood the appeal of immortality.

But it’s the inhuman quality of Tiffany that entrances James most: she is cold and faraway. Otherworldly. Astral.

She gets to be the world, which makes him the ending. There is no revelation. He orbits her. She spins. Gradually, they become orphaned from their morals, and they feel that something has died, but also that something’s been born.

For months, Tiffany and James fuck without touching. It’s been done before.