The Rabbit Hutch

by Tess Gunty

On a hot night in Apartment C4, Blandine Watkins exits her body. She is only eighteen years old, but she has spent most of her life wishing for this to happen. The agony is sweet, as the mystics promised. It’s like your soul is being stabbed with light, the mystics said, and they were right about that, too.

bliss—as Blandine exits herself, she is all of it. She is every tenant of her apartment building. She is trash and cherub, a rubber shoe on the seafloor, her father’s orange jumpsuit, a brush raking through her mother’s hair. The first and last Zorn Automobile factory in Vacca Vale, Indiana. A nucleus inside the man who robbed her body when she was fourteen, a pair of red glasses on the face of her favorite librarian, a radish tugged from a bed of dirt.

She is no one. She is Katy the Portuguese water dog, who licked her face whenever the foster family banished them both in the snow because they were in the way. An algorithm for amplified content and a blue slushee from the gas station. The first pair of tap shoes on the feet of a child actress and the man telling her to try harder. She is the smartphone that films her as she bleeds on the floorboards of her apartment, and she is the chipped nail polish on the teenager who assembled the ninetieth step of that phone on a green factory floor in Shenzhen, China. An American satellite, a bad word, the ring on the finger of her high school theater director. She is every cottontail rabbit grazing on the vegetation of her supposedly dying city. Ten minutes of pleasure igniting between the people who made her, the final tablet of oxycodone on her mother’s tongue, the gavel that will sentence the boys to prison for what they’re doing to Blandine right now. There is no such thing as right now. She is not another young woman wounded on the floor, body slashed by men for its resources—no. She is paying attention. She is the last laugh.

On that hot night in Apartment C4, when Blandine Watkins exits her body, she is not everything. Not exactly. She...

as he nurses. As usual, predators are wreaking havoc on the internet. Predators are the only people in town. If she had to summarize the plot of contemporary life, the mother would

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.

He stands and takes her back in his hands, kneading muscles and skin, and she wonders who designs costumes for bearded dragons, what species will study evidence of hers in 90 million years, and what misunderstandings will result. What would a nuclear explosion feel like? Would the death be instantaneous? Are there physical buttons involved? Will her busted vagina ever resume its life as a pussy? Where did the dead mouse land after she flung it out of their window? Where is that man she saw at the drive-through, and what is he doing right now? Is this the most valuable work of her life? Is she a psychopath? Is she a threat to them all?

“Why can’t you let it go?” asks Reggie. There are some questions spouses ask each other over and over for decades, starring a fatal flaw that one has perceived in the other. Between Reggie and Ida, this is one such question. “Why can’t you let anything go?”

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

Her solitude is as prominent as the cross around her neck. You could be persuaded you’d never seen her before, even if you passed her daily. You could be persuaded you saw her every day, even if you’d never passed her before. You’d ask her for directions; you’d tag her with a name like Susan and with a job in accounting; you’d assume that she keeps a bird feeder. She could be your neighbor. She could be your relative. She could be anyone.

Joan picks a cuticle. Her nail beds are catastrophic.

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.

Loneliness grips Blandine with the force of a puppeteer.

“Well, Joan, between you and me, I’m giving mysticism a go, myself. I think I have a real shot. From what I can tell, theism isn’t a necessary prerequisite. All I want is to exit my body.”

“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?” Joan looks her in the eye for the first time. “Yes.” “It’s like what Simone Weil says. ‘To know that this man who is hungry and thirsty really exists as much as I do—that is enough, the rest follows of itself.’ Simone was a bona fide mystic.” Blandine

Alone, Blandine grips her forehead. She’s certain that she has some kind of social impairment; she just doesn’t know what it’s called. Internet quizzes never know what to do with her. In general, she feels too much or too little, interacts too much or too little—never the proper amount. It seems to her that she’s spent her whole life sitting in a laundromat, freaking people out.

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.

Joan has never confidently traversed a crosswalk in her life, and she profoundly distrusts people who claim they don’t like bread.

In the spotlight of direct attention, she becomes conscious of behavior programmed to operate unconsciously, like breathing and eye contact. She stares too long or not long enough, blinks too often or too little, inhales at irregular intervals, yawns in moments of suspense.

A Selection of Life Lessons, in No Particular Order: Supplement therapy with boxing lessons. Energy can neither be created nor destroyed.

Always get on the sailboat. If someone refuses alcohol, never ask why. Tell no one, excepting your agent, that you can cry on command.

Bring pot brownies to your private bankers and flirt with them, if possible. If you see someone weeping on a bridge, always stop and place your hand on that person’s shoulder.

The more attractive the stranger, the greater the imperative to use a condom.

Forgo social media.

Believe in ghosts but not God, unless your conception of God is much like a ghost.

The streets you walk, the food you eat, the job you work, the method of transportation you choose, the beauty products you purchase, the shows you watch, the links you click, the way you sit on a train, the way you speak to waiters, the way you take your coffee—everything affects everyone. Find a way to believe this, even when sober.

An Open Letter to My First Husband: Although I forgive you for the incredible pain you inflicted upon my young and tender heart, I am glad we never reproduced. You mugged my twenties. It is shocking to me that you are still alive.

Listen to me very closely: being looked at is not the same as being seen.

All my life, I just tried to have some fun. I was an artist of fun and a failure at everything else. What we need, at the end, is a parent or two. A leash and a fence, a bedtime, a tooth fairy. Milk on the stove. But if we’re lucky, we are furthest from childhood at the end of our lives.

How did you get this number? I typed. I am a slow typer. He sent a rabbit emoji. At once, I knew that this was, as they say, the beginning of the end. Soon, I would have to do a lot of agonizing. This is it, isn’t it, I texted Death. He sent me a GIF of a walrus vigorously nodding, with the caption: Indeed, indeed, indeed, indeed, indeed.

If you want to know me, memorize the wine stains on my sheets, I tweeted reluctantly. I am sorry I cannot be of more service. I have only seen myself three times. Once while observing a female wolf at my hometown zoo. Once at the Temple of the Feathered Serpent in Teotihuacán, Mexico. Once at the fish tank outside of the shoe store in Key West.

Suddenly, it was a Friday in the four o’clock range, two weeks before my death—my most loathed hour. A purgatorial hour, neither afternoon nor evening, too early to eat and too early to drink, an hour that encourages its hostages to tally up their failures, an hour that portrays one’s entire life as a parking garage. I stared at my phone.

I am still haunted by what my son said to me on the balcony, during my sixtieth birthday party: Here you are with your five-hundred-dollar cake, and still you want to jump.

All my life, I have been cute. These conditions make you selfish, and America knows them well. Then one day you find yourself in a boutique of terminal illness, forced to purchase something in order to use the bathroom, and from then on, you have nothing to think about except a catalogue of the instances you took when you could have given.

I want to tell my son that I am so sorry. Death is in the room with me now, doing squats beside the air conditioner. We wear identical socks. Socks embroidered with white rabbits. While I wait, I Command F my life for mentions of my son, details that might justify his absence. Or maybe I’m looking for a contradiction, a counterargument, proof that I wasn’t such a bad mother, after all. No matches. I shut the screen, inconsolable because my cursor is gone.

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.

Concluding Remarks on Fame and Death: They’re both so lonely and boring.

The bird nests and twigs and valley shit she collects. Animal bones. Sometimes, when she’s not home, I snoop around her room, which smells like weed and roses. Glass bottles of spiky plants crowd the windowsills. Above her bed, she’s taped depressing internet biographies of people no one’s ever heard of. She keeps a lot of Venus flytraps.

Thinking too much can zap you dead, and Blandine—she just shuts herself in rooms and thinks. Thinks and thinks and thinks herself into all kinds of doom, and by sundown she’s afraid of the doorknob.

Thing about Malik is, he has absolutely no acne. You look at him, with his dopey, perfect smile and his dopey, perfect skin, and you feel a special kind of hatred.

said Malik. “And she’s not a vegan.” “You sure about that?” “Believe me, we’d know if she was. Vegans make themselves known.”

Tastefully arranged shadows make the furniture appear more expensive and the people more fertile than they actually are.

“Then what qualifies you to write a mental health blog.” She’s alluring but dull-eyed, and her lack of affect tugs at Moses’s nerves. He feels violently white and male in her presence, and he can’t explain why. She’s white, too.

“Then how does that qualify as a mental health blog,” deadpans the woman. Were you raised by robots? he decides not to ask.

He is sweating. He’s afraid he will do something drastic—he feels bad behavior coiling inside him like a wild cat. He’ll throw a lamp out the window, he’ll begin mooing or stripping, he’ll push this woman onto the floor. No, no. No.

Moses checks his phone the way a regular person would.

Ampersand is the only non-chain establishment in Vacca Vale that approximates a coffeehouse. Opened by a pair of optimistic hipsters, it attracts a disproportionate number of people in berets.

With his smile, and those jeans, it’s evident to Blandine that no one has ever truly criticized this young man to his face, and that he’s a product of extreme parental love. He believes that the whole world ought to love him like that, Blandine assumes.

Blandine hates this undemanding caricature of sympathy, which so often manifests as pity. She believes it is native to the overly loved and the never-truly-criticized.

Joan apologized three more times, then returned to her seat, feeling evil. As usual, when she confronted the world about one of its problems, the world suggested that the problem was Joan.