The Rabbit Hutch

by Tess Gunty

“I actually believed that our objectives and interests were shared throughout that entire fever dream. What a fucking numbskull I was last year. I thought—I actually believed that I loved you. I believed I was in love with you. And maybe it was some strand of love, but so what? We spent six months fracking each other’s souls—just because we got a little oil out of it doesn’t make it good. 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. Like how ancient societies used to give children cocaine before sacrificing them.

He has the appearance of a man who has weathered many internal sandstorms and whose convictions—once sharp and exquisite—have lost their definition.

“I just wish—sometimes I look out at my life, everything I’ve seen so far, and it all looks so—so grotesque. I look for the virtue, I don’t see any. I’m dying for proof of it, you know, proof of something good—something like divinity. But I don’t see it. I look at my life, and I see this warehouse of—of gargoyles. Why do vices get to be physical? Why do they get to clutter up the world? Why can’t I see any fucking virtues?” This is the part that has made her cry the hardest. She’s too upset to be embarrassed, too upset to hate him as he touches her arm.

He removes his hand, then rummages in the car to find a packet of tissues. He offers her one, and she takes it, blowing her nose as prettily as possible, although she knows that she is repulsive.

“Should I take you back?” he asks. She looks at him, heart pounding and face wet. “What?” “I mean,” he says, “to your apartment. You’ve got that goat, now, and I don’t want to—” Of course that’s what he meant. Of course. Why does Blandine feel crushing disappointment? What is wrong with her?

You’re so angry, Tiffany. I can see that. You have every right to be angry at me. But it sounds like you’re angry at yourself for supposedly choosing this, and your choice should have been moot, don’t you see? You could’ve showed up at my house in lingerie and thrown yourself at me—it wouldn’t have mattered. It was my responsibility to make sure nothing happened between us. I was entrusted with you as a student, and it was my responsibility to protect you. I was the one who should have enforced the boundaries, and I failed. I may not have taught you anything, but I was your teacher. You were only—you were only seventeen.” He covers his face in his hands. His voice breaks. “For fuck’s sake.”

“Please,” he says, “beat me up.” She considers it. “You are not a good person.” “I agree.” “You’re a narcissist.” “I agree.” “You deplete everyone in your orbit, you get them to serve you and save you and give and give and give, and—worse—you get them to do it without forcing them to. You get people to choose to indenture themselves to you. You treat young women like intravenous nutrients until they believe that’s what they are—until they believe you’re what they’re for. Like Jim fucking Jones.”

He holds her automatically, his force restrictive and secure and warm, and she tries not to enjoy these things, but 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.

Unable to quarantine the scream any longer, she unleashes it. He steps back as she does, looking frightened. The scream is animal. Ancestral. The scream of the first woman in the first dirt wounded by the first man. “That was part of your plan, wasn’t it, James? My freakishness was part of your fucking plan! I bet Zoe was the same way. I bet she felt like an outcast until you came along and made her feel special. I bet you made her feel like she couldn’t connect with people her own age because she was just too mature, too sensitive, too intelligent. Different from the rest because she was unique, because she was brilliant, because she was destined for great things. I bet you told her that for months before making a move. Where did you fuck her? In your house? In your office?” “It didn’t happen, Tiffany.” His tone is resolute. “Nothing. Happened.”

I never told anyone. I obeyed you. I kept your fucking secret because I mistook it for mine.”

Blandine Watkins turns away from James Yager and runs home, through the rain, daring cars to hit her.

He’s seen them in the lobby before, where they often make videos of indeterminate content. One of them is vigorously attractive, another decently so, the third not at all. But the third seems sweet. He’s the only one who ever smiles at the teenager. Those boys are a little older than he is, but they could have been his friends, in another life. What struck him most was their energy—they seemed to be pumped full of color and noise, a force strong enough to power itself down. He never worked up the courage to talk to them.

Like most people, Reggie does not want to touch dead mice. Like most people, Reggie gets through the day by believing he and all his loved ones are exempt from mortality, and he hates when death asserts itself like this.

Mouse or spouse, a voice tells Reggie. Mouse or spouse. The voice sounds like that of his fifth-grade teacher, a woman with black hair, a limp, and psoriasis, with whom he was infatuated. She often made up rhymes to help her students remember facts. She smelled like coal tar—like a fresh street. What a woman! Reggie heaves himself out of his armchair, pushes his feet into his flip-flops, and walks to the balcony. So far, his seventies have felt like the last mile of a marathon—which he used to run, back when his body was his. Everything aches and dehydration reigns. His vision is scattered, unfocused. He keeps walking into rooms and forgetting why. This frightens him, until he inevitably forgets the fear.

Decades ago, Ida, the kids, and he spent the Fourth of July with his sister Brandy in Northern California. Reggie was working as an electrical technician for Zorn Automobiles at the time. It was before they lost the house. Even though finances weren’t as tight as they were about to become, Ida and Reggie had saved for a year to afford the trip, and the children were ecstatic—they had never left the state.

They sat around a table in Brandy’s backyard and Reggie’s kids wouldn’t stop shivering, moaning about the cold. “It’s July,” complained Mike, the oldest. “It’s dry heat,” snapped Brandy. “That’s why days don’t feel as muggy and horrible as they do where you’re from.” Where you’re from. Reggie couldn’t stand it. Already, the kids were depressed that there were no fireworks, and now they had to pretend to like the hippie tea that Brandy served them.

“I like it better in Vacca Vale,” whispered his youngest child and only girl, Tina, eight years old, revealing her shambolic teeth in the dark, which would soon cost Reggie his overtime. Tina was not yet an alcoholic married to an incarcerated robber; she was a child who loved Atomic Fireball candies, jungle ecosystems, and doing “gymnastics” off the diving board. Her pillowcase, which she insisted on bringing, was printed with tigers. Campfire smoke in her hair. “I like our weather,” she whispered. “Back home.”

Now, decades later, on the balcony, Reggie fills his lungs with a Vacca Vale night, hoping that Tina is sober enough to enjoy it.

The mouse’s fur is tan, not gray, which disturbs Reggie. It suggests some kind of individuality. He can see the veins of its ears. The ears make him think of Tina again, and his chest gets tight. In one quick motion, he forces himself to scoop the mouse with the plastic bag. Pulls the bag inside out, ties the top, and marches back into the apartment.

Reggie stands for a moment, watching the television to escape the life in front of him. Local news. One man murdered another at a bar called Burnt Toast last week, and now the bar is closing.

Reggie turns and shuffles to the door. A memory descends on him like a bird, and he welcomes it. He was fifteen years old. It was the day he met Ida, a spitfire farm girl, one year older. He had moved to Vacca Vale from Gary, Indiana, one week before. Ida’s mother sought his after Mass one Sunday, took her hand, and welcomed her to town. The dads bashfully attempted conversation near the doughnuts and coffee, which left Reggie to stare at Ida, terrified. Puberty was a time of mysterious anguish and constant humiliation. Why am I visible? he wondered every day. But Ida liked being visible, and that was obvious as soon as he saw her. She returned his gaze as though consenting to a duel, her neck long, her chin tilted upward, her skin tight and shiny with a summer tan. She was a few inches taller than he was. “The coffee here is awful,” she said. Sweat attacked him sharply, like an army of toothpicks. “Is that so?” he asked, his voice cracking. “Yeah,” she said, “but the doughnuts are like manna.”

On their first date, she stole a golf cart from her neighbors and drove them five miles to the industrial farmland on the outskirts of their city, cackling gorgeously, flinging jokes into the night. He had never seen a woman drive anything before. She was free, and strong, and she smelled like the earth. “My father says the devil sneezed on me at birth,” she told Reggie as she drove at full speed—fifteen miles an hour—down an empty backroad, into a cornfield. “He says that’s why I’m so bad.”

Sixty-two years later, Reggie squints at Ida’s white hair, flooded with affection, pity, fear. The blend, he supposes, amounts to love. He wishes he could prove it.

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.

With great concentration, thought by thought, Joan replaces her guilt with anger, as her father once replaced his addiction to alcohol with an addiction to food.

The night is deformed altogether now. She switches the television back on and changes the channel to a documentary about whale songs. Joan learns that although the females are capable of making sound, they rarely do. Only the males sing. Severe noise pollution can cause internal bleeding in whales, and even, in the worst cases, death.

Nothing was real for nineteen years and then.

He gulps the whiskey. Referring to Tiffany as a kid sends him into a paroxysm of revulsion. He frees himself from it.

Joan is wearing a dress that belonged to her mother, rainwater dotting her shoulders and calves. She misses her mother like a phantom limb.

Stasis looks unnatural on the girl, who is visibly drained of the frenetic energy that Joan observed the first time they met. Joan is reminded of a photograph she once saw: a horse sitting on a carpet in a darkened room, watching television.

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.

I am indescribably grateful to my parents and brothers, who have nurtured my love of reading and writing since I was a child. My mother, the greatest art teacher on earth, taught us that creativity requires mess, mistakes, and love. My father read to us every night and patiently transcribed my stories before I knew how to spell.

In “The Expanding Circle,” Moses references the moral philosopher Peter Singer’s 1997 thought experiment, “The Drowning Child and the Expanding Circle.”

“Pearl” references a fictional woman who is inspired by the real-life Rose Marie Bentley (1918–2017). Like Pearl, Bentley also owned a pet store and died of natural causes at the age of ninety-nine, never receiving a diagnosis of situs inversus with levocardia while she was alive. Bentley donated her body to a research university, where anatomy students discovered her condition.