When Rabbit Howls

by Truddi Chase

“How did you feel about that?” “Nothing. I felt nothing.” He wrote it on his clipboard: “Distanced. Removed.” All victims, to one degree or another, distanced themselves from their feelings.

The Interpreter searched for words to fit the mechanics of what she observed, and found them: the woman did not “lack” particular mechanisms; she had purposely been constructed to function without them.

Her only knowledge of people in any season, she told him, had come from the movies the paternal grandmother took her to each summer and from school, where she’d been carefully invisible, going silently from class to class and shrinking from close contacts.

“I get the feeling,” she said, “that I’m doing things wrong all the time. It isn’t just the mail, either. I can’t relate properly to people. I can’t be like them. I don’t have feelings or emotions of my own; when a situation calls for responsiveness, I’m lost.”

always felt a terrible lack of love in any relationship, unless I was good—a pliant, perfect person. I didn’t feel anything for them, not really. It wouldn’t matter if everyone died tomorrow, that’s how much they affect me.

“Holy, unmitigated shit,” said a gravelly voice, “how do we get out of this black hole?”

Someone had to present a façade, someone who would not know what killed the first-born, or what happened afterward, to us as individuals. The few glimpses we’ve had of the child core—she is so undeveloped that she can’t voice her own words.