Bunny (Bunny, #1)

by Mona Awad

“He called me dark, twisted, and mean.” “How sweet. He’s in love.”

Her perfume smells like rain and smoke and her eye makeup scares small children and she wears pumps even though she’s at least two inches taller than I am and I’m a freak. Why? Because life is shorter than we are, she says, so why beat around the bush?

She looks so much like a cupcake that when I first met her at orientation, I had a very real desire to eat her. Bite deeply into her white shoulder. Dig a fork in her cheek.

Why do you lie so much? And about the weirdest little things? my mother always asked me. I don’t know, I always said. But I did know. It was very simple. Because it was a better story.

As though everyone in the academic world has just now discovered that they are vesseled in precarious, fastly decaying houses of bone and flesh and my god, what material. What a wealth of themes and plot!

Because books are dead, Smackie, didn’t you know?

She sounds like a schizophrenic songbird gone off the rails.

Whatcha workin’ on there? they might ask me. Uncovering your secret shame, I thought.

But we knew the truth too.” “We? What do you—” “That you were just a lonely girl. That you were a sad girl.”

look out the window. I see green leaves, I see boy blood, green leaves, boy blood. Ava. I see Ava.

It subverts the whole concept of genre.” “And gender narratives.” “And the patriarchy of language.” “Not to mention the whole writing medium.” “It basically fucks the writing medium, Samantha. Which is dead anyway, you know?”

literally this is about this book LOL

“You want to be empowered.” “You want creative agency.” “You want agency, period. Control.” “Over your art.” “Over your life, Bunny.”

Fuck you, poets. You think you are so smart, so cool with your word art. You have no idea.

To skim the literature and movies and music and myths of the world and take only the cream.

Think of songs that would make me feel, as I lay in my bed listening, that I was ascending from the cheap sheets toward the ceiling. A wet spring night wafting in. Sweet with dripping green. Rob Valencia’s long, lovely shadow passing me in the school hallway, trailing his scent of slaughter and smoke. The Lion stirring his tea. Telling me what, I don’t even remember. Because behind him was a window where I could see a sky so wide and purple-yellow and lovely that he could see anytime. Dancing with Diego who never had a face. The smell of rained-on sage. Tendons flexing in a neck. The chiseled, tattooed arms of a fire-eater I saw once in Edinburgh. The way he looked me in the eye when he tipped the flame into his mouth. A one-eyed wolf I became fixated with for a while at the zoo I used to visit as a teenager. If he escaped everything would go horribly wrong but it would be beautiful too. And then I think of the stag I just saw outside. Its eyes like smoke. Probably long disappeared into the trees.

And that’s when I realize that whatever pain I have, whatever true want I have that lives under all this greasy, spineless needing to please isn’t something I want to give them.

Suddenly I am the weird, sad circus vegetable. And it’s the absurdly priced organic produce that is staring at me with something like horror.

Should we go to Trader Joe’s and get more cookie butter? I need it, like, for my soul.

She is cherry blossoms falling. She is serious moonlight. She is shivering green leaves.

Is he crying or is it the rain? We’ll never know. And anyway, listen to the love song swelling all around us.

words. I never meant to give this to you.

“When is she going to be empowered, Samantha? Hmm? Exercise agency? When is she going to assume responsibility for all the shit she’s stirred up?”

Samantha. Please. Listen to me. Stop this, okay? This has to stop. You need to stop pretending.

Because we were already running away again, me and my imagination. We were holding hands on the edge of the cliff by the North Sea, we were high, high up in a redwood tree, we were on a train to Paris, we were blue-lipped in the river trying to swim to India. Or we were just fucking running. Down a steep and endless hill, she and I, holding hands. She was a great girl-shaped forest. She was a thing on fire. Her hand was leaves and smoke and snow and flesh all at once. We were running away together down a curving dirt road, through a dipping valley of grass, by a rushing mud-colored river, into an even greater forest, or we were just running who knows where? No idea. Didn’t care. But I was excited. My life could change. And I wasn’t alone anymore.

All the love and hate I have in my heart plus one fucking bunny.