The Haunting

by Joyce Carol Oates

  In the winter the rabbits' cries grow more pleading and piteous. Calvin hears them, too. But Calvin pretends he doesn't. I press my pillow over my head not wanting to hear. We don't want to die. We don't want to die. One night when Mommy is at the caf‚ slip from my bed barefoot and go downstairs into the cellar that smells of oozing muck and rot and animal misery and there in the dim light cast by the single light bulb are the rabbits.

  Rabbits in each of the cages! Some of them have grown too large for the cramped space, their hindquarters are pressed against the wire and their soft ears are bent back against their heads. Their eyes shine in apprehension and hope seeing me. A sick feeling comes over me, each of the cages has a rabbit trapped inside. Though this is only logical as I will discover through my life. In each cage, a captive. For why would adults who own the world manufacture cages not to be used. I ask the rabbits, Who has locked you in these cages? But the rabbits can only stare at me blinking and twitching their noses. One of them is a beautiful pale powder-gray, a young rabbit and not so sick and defeated as the others. I stroke his head through the cage wire. He's trembling beneath my touch, I can feel his heartbeat. Most of the rabbits are mangy and matted. Their fur is dull gray. There is a single black rabbit, heavy and misshapen from his cage, with watery eyes. The doors of the cages are latched and locked with small padlocks. Both the cages and the padlocks are rusted. I find an old pair of shears in the cellar and holding the shears awkwardly in both hands I manage to cut through the wires of all the cages, I hurt my fingers peeling away openings for the rabbits to hop through but they hesitate, distrustful of me. Even the young rabbit only pokes his head through the opening, blinking and sniffing nervously, unmoving.

  Then I see in the cellar wall a door leading to the outside. A heavy wooden door covered in cobwebs and the husks of dead insects. It hasn't been opened in years but I am able to tug it open, a few inches at first, then a little wider. On the other side are concrete steps leading up to the surface of the ground. Fresh cold air smelling of snow touches my face "Go on! Go out of here! You're free."

  The rabbits don't move. I will have to go back upstairs, and leave them in darkness, before they will escape from their cages.

  "Ceci? Wake up."

  Mommy shakes me, I've been sleeping so hard.

  It's morning. The rabbit cries have ceased. Close by running behind our backyard is the Cuyahoga & Erie train with its noisy wheels, almost I don't hear the whistle any longer. In my bed pushed against the wall.

  When I go downstairs into the cellar to investigate, I see that the cages are gone.

  The rabbit cages are gone! You can see where they've been, though, there's empty space. The concrete floor isn't so dirty as it is other places in the cellar.

  The door to the outside is shut tight. Shut, and covered in cobwebs like before.

  Outside, where cages were dumped in the weeds, they've been taken away, too. You can see the outlines in the snow.

  Calvin is looking, too. But Calvin doesn't say anything.

  Mommy says, lighting a match in a way Daddy used to, against her thumb, and raising it to the cigarette dipping from her mouth, "At last those damn stinking cages have been hauled away. It only took five months for that bastard to move his ass."

  Burned alive were words that were used by strangers but we were not allowed to hear. Burned alive in his bed it was said of our father on TV and elsewhere but we were shielded from such words

  Unless Calvin heard. And Calvin repeated to me.

  Burned alive drunk in his bed. Gasoline sprinkled around the trailer and a match tossed. But Randy Malvem was a man with enemies, in his lifetime that was thirty-two years he'd accumulated numerous enemies and not a one of these would be linked to the fire and not a one of these was ever arrested in the arson death though all were questioned by the sheriff and eventually released and some moved away, and were gone.

  Now the cages are gone. And now I hear the rabbits' cries in the wind, in the pelting rain, in the train whistle that glides through my sleep. Miles from home I hear them, through my life I will hear them. Cries of trapped creatures who have suffered, who have died, who await us in Hell, our kin.

  The End