by Mona Awad
“What about if we tried using other animals?” we hear ourselves suggest. “Like instead of bunnies?”
Sudden silence. All mini foods set down. Champagne flutes frozen midsip.
Bunny looks at us like she doesn’t understand our words. Other animals? Instead of?
“Like what other animals, Bunny?”
“Don’t know,” we say. Suddenly it is very hard to recall any other animal besides Bunny. When we look around in our minds all we see are floppy ears, puffy tails.
“Oh, like what about a wolf?” we say at last. “Or a deer. Or maybe some sort of bird could be interesting. As an experiment.”
Bunny looks at us like we are insane. Possibly mutinous.
“Just as an experiment,” we say softly, lowering our eyes. “Just wondering can we only use bunnies?”
“Why would we use anything other than bunnies, Bunny?”
“Well, then maybe we could try making something other than a boy?” we say, regretting it immediately.
“Bunny, we don’t make boys, we told you. They’re Hybrids.”
“Darlings.”
“Drafts.”
“Also, we don’t make.”
“Okay. Well, maybe—”
Bunny cuts us off, feeling we are missing the point of this exercise. What she means is that we need to go deeper, richer, stranger. Draw from the well of—
“We need a cock that fucking works. I know I do.”
Silence falls. We stare at our mini plates. Does Bunny have to be so crude? And yet her point cannot be denied. She has a way of cutting to the chase, it’s true. It’s why we love her even though it’s hard sometimes. It’s true that for all our experiments, we have yet to make a Hybrid with working sexual organs. Or hands of actual human flesh.
“Fuck hands,” says our crudest, truthiest Bunny. “I want the cock.”
“Maybe it’s time for Samantha to participate more in the circle,” one of us says.
It is so weird for us to hear that name spoken. So familiar but faraway. We perk up our twitchy ears. We haven’t led Workshop yet. Soon, Bunny, Bunny keeps telling us. We’re actually really excited at what you can bring to us. Given all your gifts, all your life experience.
But honestly we’re afraid of that. Because what if this is Bunny’s gift, not ours?
Don’t be silly!
“The boys—I mean Hybrids—are getting better just by having her nearby. Less weird mouths, way less ooze. We’re also not getting nearly as many screamy ones lately. Or tails.”
“Also, they seem more . . . willful.”
“And better in bed. I mean not in bed, obviously, but at least they’re not so afraid of beds anymore.”
“Or maybe we’re just getting better,” Bunny says. “ I think we’re also getting better generally speaking.”
“I like the ones with tails,” says another one of us. “The tails are hot. Can we make me one with a tail, please? Ooh, and a snout. We should have another Broken Boy, I mean Draft party. We haven’t had one in ages.”
Bunny, you’re disgusting, we say. You’re so disgusting oh my god. But we love you anyway, Bunny, like you’re our very own sick, alienlike little baby who looks just like a gross old man the way babies can sometimes look to everyone but their mother.
Bunny makes a face at us. A funny face.
Oh, Bunny, you’re so funny.
We say Bunny is so funny and we laugh because it’s true. She is so funny.
We laugh and we laugh and we laugh and there is a waiter who comes and asks us why are we laughing, Is everything okay? He asks in this so-concerned voice and that is even funnier so we laugh more. Our laughter makes him uncomfortable because he doesn’t get it, he’s not in on the joke, even though he wants to be, you can tell by his wanting face, which is even funnier to us. We laugh even harder, we grip our barre-toned stomachs so hard we can’t breathe. We almost die right there among our mini foods. Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, so funny. We probably burn at least a thousand calories laughing because it is so, so funny, this joke we are in on about Bunny being funny. Being a funny Bunny.
And now we are hungry again. We are hungry for Pinkberry. So hungry for it, oh my god. Oh my god, we should go. Is it open?
It’s open, we should go.
We should go. We should go we should go we should go. Can we go?
We can go, Bunny.
Oh my god, how much does Bunny love Pinkberry? She loves it so much she loves it so much she loves it so fucking much oh my god. We are so happy right now, we could hop, we could dance. Who will dance with us?!
As we ask this question, a pain seizes us, a memory of a roof. A woman’s hand covered in black mesh. A pair of eyes, one blue one brown, like some cool man singer, what is his name? For a minute, we can’t breathe. She has a name, this woman with the hands of mesh. She held us close once, but never too close. She smelled of something, what did she smell of? Something musk. Something leaf. She had hair like white feathers. What was her name again? Her name was—
We’ll dance with you, Bunny.
We dance all the way to the mall. Sometimes on the inside, sometimes on the outside, sometimes both. On the way, there are so many funny things and we laugh at them all. There are so many cute things, also. We can’t help but coo and clap our hands at the so-cute things of this world. 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. One of us does a yoga pose right there on the street, a show-off move where she lifts right into a headstand pose, her legs in the air, balancing on her head and elbows. It is called Crow. We look at her long, slender body, all the ballerina-trained muscles taut in the upper half of this long, slender body, and we remember she nearly flunked out of Interlochen. We remember she has a weird-shaped face and forlorn hair that looks poorly pasted onto her temples. We remember her stories are dumb, she won no prizes at Barnard. Her nose looks semi-smashed onto her face. Her eyes are pretty in some kinds of light, but most of the time they are a drab no color. We remember all of this and then we say, Oh my god, amazing. You are amazing. Wow. Can we be you, please?
We are walking down the steeply sloping hill, la la la, the hill upon which the towers and bells of Warren shimmer like a wish. Like the corsages we wear on our wrists for Prom Thursdays. As we make our way down the hill, entering the downtown, it’s spooky. The air is different here. Humider. Grosser. The sky a dark pink that reminds us of innards, of what happens in the bathroom with the ax with the Darlings who don’t make it. We’re passing the scary places now. To get to Pinkberry we have to pass some scary places and to get through them you have to think Pinkberry Pinkberry Pinkberry. This city is not cute like Pinkie Pie or even scary-cute like a young Marlon Brando. We hold each other close past tattoo parlors and abandoned storefronts. Past the old lady with the spider tattoo on her neck who will be in all of our stories next week. She is waiting for a bus, a grimy bus, we imagine, that takes her to her trash- and raccoon-filled home where she eats quivery things out of jars. Hold me close, Bunny. Can you hold me close? Closer? We cannot hold each other close enough somehow, even though we can’t breathe because of how tightly, how fiercely we are hanging on to each other, but it still feels like we are not holding anything. We miss something somehow. Like we could hug and hug and hug until our ribs crack and our hearts burst and our lungs collapse and our arms break off and still. We’d still be hugging air. No body.
That’s when we feel it, no, smell it. We smell her first. Firewood. Leaf. We’re about halfway down the hill when we feel a mesh hand cupped ove
r our face and suddenly we are dragged, dragged, dragged into a nearby alley between the abandoned storefronts.
“Don’t fucking scream,” a voice whispers in our ear, with a menthol cigarette breath. “Don’t fucking breathe.”
Out in the street, we hear Bunny calling our name.
“Bunny? Bunny? Bunny, where are you, Bunny? Where did you go?”
“Bunny? Where did she go?”
Here, Bunny! we want to scream through the mesh fingers.
We can hear Bunny turning round and round in her ballerina flats, her brogues, her shiny Mary Janes, her combat bootlets. Tap tap tap on the sidewalk. Looking for us.
We’re here, Bunny! we want to scream. In the scary dark! In the creepy alley with god knows how many rats and spiders and killers. We’d say this but we’re afraid to, this perfumed hand around our mouth, the other hand clasped tightly around our pulled-back arms.
We make a noise through her mesh fingers. A noise of protest.
Shhhhh, says the voice, which sounds all hissy and spitty like a snake. If a snake could talk it would sound just like this.
“All right. Let’s go,” we hear Bunny say. “She’ll find us. If she wants to find us, she will.”
Then we see Bunny looking down the alleyway, squinting. “Bunny? Are you there?”
“Yes!” we scream.
But the hand grips tighter around our face, muffling the sound.
We watch Bunny give a cursory look down the alleyway before she turns away. Once Bunny has left, a mouth in our ear slowly counts to thirty, then the hands holding us prisoner let go.
We run down the alley to see where they have gone. But the street is empty and oh so dark. Then all at once the streetlights go off. We can’t see anything. “Bunny,” we whisper. “Where are you?”
The world is blacker than it has ever been. We are lost. We are lost, we are lost, we are—
16.
You’re welcome,” says a voice behind us. We turn around. We see nothing but a dark, slim shape.
“Who are you?”
“Are you fucking kidding me?” the dark shape says, stepping in closer. Our eyes adjust. A girl. We look at her for a long time, this girl. We are about to open our mouth and scream but something in her face stops us. We know her from somewhere, somewhere before Bunny. Also, we are mesmerized by her ugliness. She is ugly to us because she took us away from Bunny and our good times and also because she is truly very strange looking. That must be on our face somehow because she looks away. Good. It gives us a break. We stare at the bricks behind her in this alley. It is such a scary alley. But she doesn’t look scared. Probably because she lives here, with the rats and spiders and killers. Probably—
“Smackie, I’ve been looking for you everywhere. Where the hell have you been?”
Strange that she calls us that. She seems to think she knows us too.
“Just school,” we shrug. “School things. So busy right now oh my god.” We look at her. She’s making a face that says What the fuck do you take me for?
What about you?” we ask. “Where have you been?”
“Looking for you.”
“Oh.” We picture her in the alleys, opening the trash can lids of the world and peering in. Getting it so wrong. “Why?”
“Because I was worried as hell.”
“Don’t worry,” we say.
“What?”
“Don’t worry.”
“Smackie, you dropped off the fucking face of the earth for like two months. What’s with the dress?”
We look down at our dress. It is covered with kittens who are wearing crowns because they are the kings and queens of this world. It is the blue of the brightest skies, which probably this girl never lived under. You can tell oh you can tell her sky was a heavy one. Always. She wanted it that way. Yes. Sought that out. Some people do.
“It’s a pretty dress,” we say and we almost swish it a little, but then we don’t, we can’t in front of this girl. She makes us embarrassed about swishing our dress somehow. Our arms stay stiff at our sides. “Love your dress too,” we tell her.
“Liar,” she says.
“No,” we say, even though we did lie just now. We hate her dress. It’s a dark and shredded-looking thing. “Love it,” we say.
“You do realize you’re in a cult, don’t you? You’re in a fucking cult.”
This word hurts our ears so we cover them and think-sing a song from the latest Disney musical, which is our new favorite musical. Which even though we only saw it recently, we have already watched five hundred times. It is about two sisters who live in a snowy place and one of them goes icy in her soul. It is based on a fairy tale. Now, the fairy tale is dark and stabby like this alley, but in the movie version there is a talking snowman and there are songs we love to sing. We are singing the one now where icy girl is alone on a snowy hill lamenting that she is icy in her heart. She wants to change but she cannot. Because her heart has turned to ice.
“Shut up, Smackie.”
It starts to rain. Hard. Because that’s the kind of weather that follows this kind of girl. She’s so slutty and dark she makes the clouds slutty and dark too. Pregnant with this dirty rain that starts to fall hard on both of us.
“I wish I could have found you earlier,” she is saying. “After that night you walked away from me for no reason, I followed you but I lost you. So I waited at your place but you never showed.”
Our place? We have a place? A dim image in our brain of a hallway that smells of sewage and boiled things.
“Smackie, look at me.”
Why does she keep calling us that? Anyway, we don’t want to look at her, this girl. Because she is weird looking, that’s why. Because her sky is soaking us to the bone, making our cocoa lemon vanilla moisturizer and our grassy perfume slide off our body in tears, in rivulets, drowning the kitten royalty on our dress. There is something about looking at her that makes us feel like we can’t breathe. Not the rib-aching laugh can’t breathe that we were can’t breathing earlier. Not the those-ducks-are-so-cute can’t breathe. This is different. Like there is a terrible sharp pin she stabbed deep into our lungs that is stuck there forever.
“Smackie,” she says softly, “look at me.” She isn’t talking in a snake voice anymore. She sounds like something as familiar as rain on the roof of our old house. Waves outside the motel in Seaside where we used to go with our mother. Wind rushing through leaves in the trees outside our bedroom window, cooling our feverish legs, scoring our dreams.
“Look at me,” she says.
Why does she want us to look at her so much? To look at her is scary, like looking at a spider in our perfect white bathtub with the gold feet. Not ours. Bunny’s. Take a bath, Bunny, Bunny said to us one night after Workshop. Feel free. But then we saw a huge spider crawling around in there, its eight legs slipping a little on the polished, gleaming enamel. We wanted so much to take a bath and close our eyes in the warm fragrant forgetting water but we couldn’t because of this thing.
“Look at me.”
We look at her and our face is a perfumed fist. Ready to smash the spider. Even though we could never kill it. Our way is to get someone else to do this work. To lay a pot over it and walk away for however many days it takes until it dies. But we look at her now. All of this goop we rubbed into our bodies has run, has slid off our skin because of her slut rain. And this time when we look at her, something in us opens. Against our will. I feel it opening. Didn’t she kill a spider for me once? Stood in my bathroom with a broom in her fist, while I watched her from the doorway. I don’t see it, she said. It’s there, I said. Keep looking, I pleaded. Please, Ava.
“Ava,” I hear myself say now.
She smiles a little, reaches out, takes my hand. Her hand, even though it’s covered in mesh, is a solid, familiar thing.
“Come on,” she says.
She doesn’t answer. I follow her anyway.
17.
I’m sitting across from her at what she says we call the monster diner, in a ripped-up booth pasted all over with duct tape.
“You used to love coming here with me,” she tells me.
“I did?” I stare at the creepy customers, cursing into their coffee cups. The cooks with their hairy lip curls and their cheap gold chains. The fish that looks like a shark, swimming around in the cloudy tank by the door.
She follows my gaze. “You loved the shark most. And it’s not a shark.”
“Is it—”
“Smackie, eat. Or I’ll make the shark eat you.”
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.”
Is there syrup? Or sprinkles somewhere? I want to ask, but I’m afraid. So I shake my head. Not hungry right now. Thanks so much, though. My mouth is dry from sugar consumption. My dress is a cold wet sack. I can’t look her in the eye, though I can feel she’s looking right at me. My phone keeps buzzing in my drowned kitten lap.
She’s telling me all the places she looked for me. Here. The library. The swan pond. Bookstores. Cafés. The zoo. At the zoo, I was always standing too close to the bear pit. Did anyone get mauled recently? How hard she tried to reach me. How she called and called. She must have thrown god knows how many stones at my window. She even climbed my fire escape once and knocked on the smashed glass, and she just saw an empty, made bed. She got to know the naked guy who hangs around my building really well, waiting on my fire escape. They shared a cigarette once. He isn’t so bad. He’s just a person who needs to be naked after a certain hour. But it’s not enough to be in his house and naked. He needs to be seen being naked. Once he’s been seen, once he’s made someone scream at the fact of his naked body, it’s like an itch got scratched and he can go inside and watch game shows.
