Bunny (Bunny, #1)

by Mona Awad

Because the violence of this place, existing as it does in the fragile heart of seething poverty, doesn’t exactly feature in the script

I am not immune to the beauty.

Sometimes when I tell myself or Ava the story, it grows teeth and it’s something. Definitely something. Other times, it comes apart in my hands like air. But if I remember all the right details. If I tell them in the right order. If I pause in the right places, trail off in the right places . . .

This place is so beautiful you find it hard to believe that it’s overrun with the insane and the desperate and the lonely.

All I see are the people she hates and the golden light she hates more falling upon buildings she wants to set fire to.

following him across the country as he chased one vivid dream of wealth after another that only he could see.

Don’t trade one kind of blindness for another.

“Saw,” I say. “I saw. I saw, I saw, I saw, I saw, I—” She smacks me again, harder this time. “Things aren’t always what they seem, are they?”

They smile encouragingly as they wait now for my words. As though I have words they want. They want me. Their bloody faces regarding me so kindly, so openly, that I know this is a friendship moment. All I have to do is give my words.

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.

Remember they hate you. Remember you hate them. I repeat these two things to myself, over and over, like a mantra.

I tell myself I have to fight this—remember you hate them, remember they hate you—but all at once I fail. I succumb. I allow the sick need that no degree of revulsion can kill to be picked up out of the cold, wet dark and petted. I melt into it, their hug, allowing, nay, willing myself to be crushed. I become one with the blob. Or as close to one as I can become.

I close my eyes the better to feel its cool, tender touch. Whose hand? Whose touch? Ava’s? You don’t deserve that hand, Bunny, we’ve been over this. Father? Father has his own problems. Father is farther away than the sink. Mother? Never again but don’t go down that road. Jonah? Can’t drag poor Jonah into this, don’t deserve that hand either. One of the Bunnies? Maybe before but not anymore. Forget about whether you like them or hate 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.

A silence so profound it’s noise. White noise. Beneath which I hear laughter. His laughter. Behind a human fist whose fingernails he’s painted all the colors of the rainbow.

“You love me?” “What a question. Of course. No one loves you like me.” She smiles at me. She means it. With her whole soul. It is holding itself open like a hand, palm 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. How alone now. Truly alone I was, making my shuffling way through the dark, the ground seeming to give beneath my feet, the dark of the street and the dark of the sky, one big dark.

“It’s sad, I suppose. What happens to her in the end.” What happens? What happens to her in the end?

Smiles that see me tangoing on the roof, no longer alone. Falling for what I didn’t know was my own invention.

How I felt so suddenly alive with possibility. Saw in her a wondrous world, an open hand, a person I knew in my bones would be someone I’d love. How I had no idea. How the not knowing was the most wonderful and terrible thing.