by Mona Awad
“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?”
“Exactly. This is about the Body. Performing the Body. The Body performing in all its nuanced viscerality.”
“The Body fucking,” Victoria adds.
Eleanor gives her a dark look. Then she looks at me with a smile like glass breaking.
They’re waiting, I see, for a response from me.
“Great. That all sounds so great. So—I’m sorry—what is it that you’re doing? Exactly?”
They look at each other again. Samantha. We always forget that she attended a state school for undergrad. The first in her family to even go to college. Maybe even high school? We always forget that. That’s okay, Bunny. Let’s break it down for her. Let’s use smaller words.
“Samantha, we’re female artists. Right?”
“Right.”
“So do you really want to be a passenger in someone else’s narrative?”
They all look at me, waiting. There is a right answer to this question. Think, think, think.
“No?”
Smiles break over their faces like golden sunshine through frowny clouds.
“Of course you don’t.”
“You want to be empowered.”
“You want creative agency.”
“You want agency, period. Control.”
“Over your art.”
“Over your life, Bunny.”
“All aspects of your life—physical, emotional, mental, spiritual . . . even—”
“You want to fuck, not be fucked,” Victoria says.
“Samantha,” Eleanor intones, “is this making sense?”
I stare at them all through Kira’s pink heart-shaped glasses. This is how she must see the world all the time. I look at their dark pink faces, so suddenly grave. I should call the police. I should run to Mexico.
“Totally.”
“Wonderful. Because we think you’re ready.”
“Ready?”
“To join us.”
“For what?”
“What else? Workshop.”
“But we just had Workshop,” I say.
They look at each other.
“We should just show her,” one of them says, Victoria I think, through a mouth full of mini fries.
“I don’t know, you guys,” Kira says. “She’s already had a pretty rough day.” She pats my hand. “Haven’t you, Bunny?”
“And is she ready for it?”
“She’s ready for it,” Eleanor says.
I look down at my phone. No response from Ava. I feel my heart sink deeper into pink waters. Where the haze was starting to clear, it’s now grown thick. I’m deep in the eye of the smiling watermelon.
“Show me,” I say.
14.
Kira’s attic. A dollhouse room you have to climb a winding staircase to reach. Steepled ceiling covered in a cloudy sky mural they tell me they painted together last year. The clouds swirly and white like a child’s idea of heaven, the blue of the sky shot through with a big bright arch of five-color rainbow. I observe the rainbow through the eyeholes of the rabbit mask they’ve just slipped over my face. Why a mask? I asked. Trust us, they said. I notice the curtains on the dormer windows are charred on the bottom, like they’ve been through multiple fires. In the corner of the room, I see a fire extinguisher. In another corner, an ax. An ax? What’s—
“You’ll see, Bunny, you’ll see,” they say, leading me by the hand to a white wicker chair in the corner. “Just sit here for now, k?”
Despite their myriad scented candles, the room is thick with the smell of something I can’t put my finger on. Something that reminds me of when my old cat Lucifer used to bite the heads off the mice he would find in the basement where I lived and leave the rodent corpses under my futon for me to find days later. Lucifer died shortly after I got accepted into Warren. A total omen, Ava said.
Ava. I should—
“You should just chill for now, Bunny. Here. This is for if you freak out,” Caroline says, placing a bucket beside me. “I mean, I doubt you will, given all you’ve seen, your life experience.”
My life experience?
“Samantha won’t freak out,” Eleanor says. “She’s been around the block.”
She smiles at me. Block. Butcher block. A knife being sharpened by a troll emoji.
Through the rabbit eyeholes, I watch her organizing something in the center of the room. A Fosco-esque display. A large book open and bloodied in the center with what looks like dark red nail polish. A toy bride lies in the middle of the nail polish blood. Beside her is a large box draped in a red velvet cloth.
“What is that?”
“You’ll see. Just don’t freak out, Bunny.”
“She might freak out.”
“I still freak out.”
“Just don’t freak out the boy—I mean, the hybrid.”
“What boy?” I ask.
“When it comes into the room, be welcoming, okay?” Caroline says. “Say hi. Smile. Smiling is important.”
I look at her lips shiny and thick with so much gloss. There’s a wavering quality to her voice, like a car swerving down a dangerous road.
I nod. “Hi. Smiling.”
“Good.” She hands me more Tic Tacs.
What are these again?
“Just a little something to take the edge off.”
“And you could really use something to take the edge off, couldn’t you?”
“We all could.”
“We all do.”
I picture a cliff. My hands gripping. I look down at the tiny blue pills in my palm.
“Trust, Bunny, remember?”
Yes. Of course I remember. Trust.
I swallow. My hands ungrip the cliff. Trust. I will not fall, I will float. Up into their high blue sky full of fluffy clouds and rainbows. Up, up, up into the pink mist and the laughing light.
Meanwhile, down below they look like they’re getting ready for some sort of party. Eleanor is working on her bloody toy-bride installation. Victoria’s crouched over a sound system. Kira is sharpening the ax with a small black stone, glaring at Caroline, who is sitting on the floor talking softly to the red velvet box.
“Sometimes I don’t understand why we have to keep doing Workshop at my place,” Kira whispers to her ax.
“Bunny,” Caroline says, her arms wrapped around the box, “are you going to make us go through this again? We’ve already said. One, your aunt is a firewoman. Two, you have an attic. Also, this apartment has an energy mine doesn’t. ’Cause it’s old.”
“I wish mine had this energy,” Eleanor says. She pets Kira’s shoulder, her white lace bell sleeve fanning out like an egret’s wing. She looks around the blue room, smiling like it’s all too beautiful.
“Did you put the suit in the hallway, Bunny?” Eleanor asks. Her voice has a weird echo in my brain. Hallway-way-way. Bunny-ny-ny.
“No,” Kira says, shaking her head slowly a thousand times. “Was I supposed to?”
“Well. Last time he came out naked, he freaked Caroline out, remember?”
Who came out naked?
“It wasn’t that he was naked, it’s that he was oozy,” Caroline says. “It was the ooze.”
“Ooze is hot,” Victoria says from her corner, where she is slouched in a chaise longue of the most voluptuous brocade. “I say more ooze.”
Caroline reaches over and tenderly brushes the delicate, auburn curls from her veiny forehead, her languid eyes. “You’re gross, Bunny.”
Eleanor puts her lacy arm on Caroline’s shoulder, and Caroline rests her cheek against it, cl
osing her eyes like Eleanor’s forearm is Xanadu.
“I love you,” she says.
“I love you,” Eleanor says.
I watch them hug each other for a good ten years.
Kira watches too, looking at a loss. “I just wish someone had told me this was going to be my job earlier, that’s all.”
“It’s not like it’s that hard, Bunny,” Caroline says, her head still on Eleanor’s shoulder. “You just put some clothes in the hallway, big deal.”
“It’s not about that, it’s just why do I have to provide the space and the suit? I don’t see why it has to be my job.” When no one responds, she adds, “Besides, maybe this time he’ll come in a suit. We’re getting better at this.”
Better? Better at what?
“I like when they come out naked,” Victoria says from her chaise, which now appears to be floating up off the ground.
“Who’s ‘they’?” I hear myself say from the corner.
They ignore me.
“What about the film? Music?” Caroline asks.
Victoria holds up a remote control like a gun. A TV in the corner comes on and a black-and-white film starts playing. A man and a woman, arm in arm, walking smiling circles around a fountain. She clicks again and speakers I can’t see suddenly flood the room with “La Vie en Rose.”
Now they gather around the box, beside the bride in her bloody book. Caroline removes the fabric to reveal a bunny, twitching his nose and flopping his ears in a cute way. Aww, says a whispery little-girl voice inside me. Bunny wunny, see?! Aww.
“Awww, he’s SO CUTE,” Kira says. “Look at his wittle pink nose!”
“Don’t!” Caroline says. “Remember, we’re not supposed to talk about how cute the bunny is.”
Kira looks like she’s about to cry, but only presses her lips together and nods. I nod too.
“He is pretty cute,” Caroline says.
Yes.
“So cute.”
So.
“Look at his ears.”
“Look at his eyes. He looks so excited. Like he knows.”
Knows what??
“Can’t we at least say good-bye?”
Good-bye? Why good-bye?
“Bye-bye, bunny.”
They all wave at it sadly. I wave too even though I don’t understand why are we waving again?
“Okay,” Kira says, “well, shall we start?”
They put their aprons on, tie them, like they’re about to bake a cake. Oh! Can I bake too?
“Here, Bunny, you better wear this,” Kira says, handing me an apron that says No Bitchin in My Kitchen.
Yay! Yay! Wait. What are we making again?
“Are we making cake things?” I ask.
Caroline puts her finger to her lips. “Shh. No talking at this point,” she says.
“Are we sure we want to let her into Workshop?” Victoria’s looking at me dully.
There is so much I want to say to this injustice, but when my mouth moves to say the pointed slappy words of retort, all that comes out is happy drool.
“Bunny,” Eleanor says. “Remember . . .” She looks at me, then cups her hands over Victoria’s ear and whispers. All I can make out in the whisper is “she” again and again. She she she she. It sounds like a meany wind blowing through trees.
Victoria looks at me and half smiles. “Fine,” she says. “She can stay.”
Yay! Yay, yay, yay, yay, yay. “Stay for what?”
They don’t answer me. Instead, they put on rabbit-head masks just like the one they slipped on my face. Complete with ears, whiskers. Slitty eyeholes through which their eyes peer out.
“What kind of boy are we trying for today?” one of the Bunny faces asks, without moving its happy lips.
“Boy?” another Bunny exclaims. “Bunny, we’ve had this conversation. We don’t refer to them by such binary labels as boy.” I can tell she’s making a grossed-out face behind the smiling rabbit mask face as she spits the word. Boy. It’s a dumb toy or a thin soup.
“Sorry. What are we supposed to call them again?” Bunny looks at Bunny inquiringly. Her eyes wide and open and innocent, fringed by fake glittery lashes.
“What aren’t they? Intertextual spaces. Fruitions. Hybrids.”
“I thought we were calling them Drafts.”
“Can we get a move on, please? I’m borny.”
I watch them move closer together, forming a tighter ring. I watch them hold hands. A swell of hot longing rises in me like a red wave. Wait. Me too in the circle. Me, me. I hold my own hands in the corner and try to make myself into a circle.
“Bunny, stop moving over there.”
I am quiet as rainbows. I am still as trees. I watch them close their so pretty eyes. I close mine too but somehow I can still see. The room is creepy-serious, quieter than even my rainbow quiet.
They begin to chant some indiscernible words. It makes the pony in me clap its hooves and dance.
I think the windows are going to break, the ceiling fan is going to come crashing down on their heads, but nothing happens for a long time. The film plays. Edith sings. The toy bride lies in her pool of fake book blood.
They stare at the bunny twitching his ears in the middle of the room.
One of them coughs from behind her cheap bunny mask with its plump pink cheeks like the bunny is wearing blush. Another one sighs. Lame. It starts to feel lame. Like when my best friend Alice and I sat around a Ouija board we made ourselves, using my protractor as a planchette. We sat there for hours until my mother knocked on the door. Give it up, girls, she said.
Then the light goes out. A wind comes. The curtains catch fire. The bunny explodes.
* * *
—
I don’t realize I’m screaming until Kira slaps my face. It renders me silent, but I can feel my mouth still stretched open into a giant O. And something is shaking violently right in my lap covered in blood. My hands. Covered in blood too. Not just blood. Bits. Wet, quivery, and sticking to my clothes, my skin. I want to run, to scream, but I can only sit there. My mouth open and trying to smile.
The Bunny girls are covered in blood and bits too. Covered from shining hair to shining shoes. But not screaming, not even moving. Silent like they’re waiting for something. One of them looks at her watch.
A knock on the door. Uh-oh! Who could that be?
They look at each other through their eyeholes.
“Kira,” Caroline says.
“What?! But I got it last time,” Kira says.
No one says anything. I keep my lips shut tight tight.
“I don’t see why I always have to get it,” Kira says. “It’s like the suit. I don’t understand.”
They’re all looking at Eleanor for confirmation, backup, a decision, but through the eyeholes of her white rabbit mask, I can see she’s got her eyes closed like she’s in a Zen place. Victoria has lifted her mask off her face. She’s chewing her gum like nothing out of the ordinary happened, like she isn’t covered in rabbit guts.
“Fine. I’ll get it,” Caroline says, standing up. She takes off her bunny mask and her apron. Smooths down her dress. Looks in the blood-splattered mirror and tosses her impossibly shiny hair so that all the strands sway and dance like laughing light. She is such magic, says the prancing pink pony in me. Isn’t she just, Samantha? Yes, I whisper, from where I am watching high, high up in the rainbow sky where the Tic Tacs have carried me. Edgeless and floating and looking down at Kira, who reaches for the ax in the corner. She doesn’t look at it. Just lightly rests a hand on it, while keeping her eyes on the door.
“After this we should go to Pinkberry,” she says to the door.
Victoria and Eleanor nod slowly. I’m nodding too. Oh yes. Pinkberry, lovely.
Then Caroline comes in, leading a beautiful man by the hand like he’s
a chimp. He walks a little like one too, I observe smilingly, through the Tic Tac clouds. Stooped. His arms a little longer than his torso. But he’s beautiful, apart from a severe harelip that sits like a botched bow on his present of a face. He’s wearing a dark blue suit and a pale blue shirt the same shade as his eyes. I notice the black leather gloves on his hands.
My mouth makes a gasping sound. My god. My god, my god, my—
“Everyone,” Cupcake announces, “this is Odysseus.”
“Hello,” the others murmur. I feel my own mouth moving too, exactly in sync with their shiny ones.
“Odysseus was just telling me how much he enjoys Fellini films and the novels of Proust. He’s also terribly well versed in Barthes’s Erotisme, and French is his first language,” Caroline says, tugging on his large hand like it’s a puppet string. “N’est-ce pas?”
He looks at her, then at the rest of us, with his wide blue uncomprehending eyes. He opens his botched mouth. Then he lets out a terrible scream.
They cover their ears. I want to cover mine but I can’t find my hands, so I just sit there.
“Kira,” Caroline says with her hands clapped over her ears.
Kira ignores her. She’s seated with her arms folded, the ax on the floor at her side. Staring straight ahead.
“KIRA,” Caroline shouts. “Come on.”
“I just feel like someone else should pull their weight for once is all,” Kira says.
“FINE,” Victoria says and grabs the ax from the floor.
“Venez avec moi,” Victoria says soothingly to Odysseus, over his banshee cry. “Ici, ici, dans la salle de bain.” She takes his hand and drags him to the small bathroom. He follows her, still screaming his head off.
From behind the closed door, we hear more screams.
Don’t worry, Bunny, they tell me, patting all my hands, which they found so, so easily. First Drafts. Part of the Process. Sometimes you have to kill your darlings, you know? In fact, that’s what we sometimes call them. Darlings.
Kill?
Victoria comes out alone. Shutting the door quickly behind her so that I cannot glimpse the bathroom or the boy inside through my eyeholes. Just Victoria. Covered with fresh blood. Covering her mouth with both hands.
