Bunny (Bunny, #1)

by Mona Awad

Skins aglow with affection and belonging as though they’d just been hydrated by the purest of mountain streams.

All you remember is Samantha Heather Mackey is the victim. Samantha Heather Mackey is in pain. Samantha Heather Mackey’s heart is on fire with all the feelings she thinks only she can feel.”

Samantha Heather Mackey thinks we have everything under the sun, that we sleep on a bed of gold, and meanwhile she sleeps on a bed of dirt. That she has nothing, nothing, and she thinks this makes her deep. It doesn’t make you deep, Samantha Heather Mackey, it just makes you rumpled and it makes you smell of old potatoes. Samantha Heather Mackey thinks she understands everything, but she fails to understand the depths of the human heart. She fails to understand the depths of our heart. Our heart our heart our heart! We’ve read Jane Eyre too, you cunt, and we’ve read The Waves, and when we read it, you know, we wept for minutes.”

So what if anatomically there are some things missing? Essential things. Like hands, genitals. An untwisted mouth. Possibly a soul. Still, it’s a good start. We’ll get better. In the meantime, look. He is holding an orchid just for us, which, if we take it from him quickly, he won’t eat first. He is brushing our hair. Doing it so tenderly, he doesn’t mean to rap the brush handle against our scalp at all. He is painting strange flowers and blobby birds on our fingernails. He is saying we are so beautiful and wild like the black moors of the Brontës, he is saying our talents are as deep as the North Sea. He is saying, Love your dress. He is saying, Pinkberry, would you like some? He is helping us in the kitchen to make Light and Sunnies or Lady Grey tea, and so what if he is more trouble than he is help? So what if he cries when we say, Will you fuck us? So what if he explodes when we say, Tell me something about you.

At the ducks, oh my god, look at the ducks, so cute. At the sky, oh my god, look at the sky, so cute. At the tall buildings reflecting the sun setting, look how shiny shiny they are. Homeless man don’t look, don’t look, don’t look, that causes an owie inside. No, do look, it’s sad. Makes you think, makes you deep. Our mothers always said to look hard at the things of this world that are owies on the eyes because they will put more colors in your inner rainbow.

She’s ordered me what she claims is my usual. I look down at a not mini plate of what appear to be blobs of yellow pus on brown pits. A chipped mug full of black bile. The pink pony inside me weeps softly. “What is this?” I ask her. “Coffee. Eggs on toast.”

“This is why we should never go downtown,” Caroline says. “At least not to the mall,” adds Kira. “You should definitely shop online from now on,” Ava says.

Their cheeks are plump and pink and shining like they’ve been eating too much sugar, but actually it’s Gossip Glow, the flushed look that comes from throwing another woman under the bus.

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.

The way she says alone makes it sound like a cave. Like some hideous, dark cave whose oozing walls are teeming with all the unpleasant things of this world, and I am crawling willingly, brazenly, into this awful space of my own free will. Shoveling the vermin I find scuttling across the floor into my mouth for sustenance.

I feel it like a sudden singing in my skin, a blaze in my blood, an opening up of my heart itself. Are you my— “Home,” he says.

A pause so pregnant it delivers, consumes its own spawn, then grows big with child again.

The absence of his voice and touch so palpable it acquired physical weight.

How empty and emptied I felt walking away with all my words still on his floor. Wanting so badly to pick them back up. Take it all back. Wipe away the night, my dumb tears, my endless tumbling out of words. I never meant to give this to you.