Cursed Bunny

by Bora Chung

  Sales for my grandfather’s friend took a nosedive. His factory ceased operations. No matter how many times his company denied the lies spread by their larger rival, consumers refused to believe them. My grandfather’s friend wanted to drink his company’s product in front of the cameras to prove how safe it was, but no broadcaster wanted to put him on the air. And there was no internet in those days, nowhere for him to turn to once he was shunned by the newspapers and television. He had no legal recourse because you couldn’t record phone conversations or screenshot texts back then—it was impossible to determine how rumors were spread. The courts ruled that there had been no slander or libel, and my grandfather’s friend ended up with debts from both his business and the lawsuit. Leaving a note in which he apologized to his family, he hanged himself, still only in his thirties. His wife, who had found the body, fainted several times during the funeral proceedings and would soon join her husband in that place from which they could never return. Their suddenly orphaned children were thankfully taken in by a relative who lived overseas, but that was the last anyone would ever hear from them.

  The very company that had spread the lies about “industrial-use alcohol” bought out its ruined competitor at far below market value. The manufacturing processes that my grandfather’s friend had devoted his life to developing were also turned over to his competitor, who buried the work in the bottom of a dark vault.

  “Why were they buried in a vault?” I naively asked when I first heard this story.

  “That evil company’s purpose was to sell lots of cheaply made spirits and earn piles of money, not come up with new and better products,” explained Grandfather. “And if they’re not going to make their products better, they’ve got to prevent others from doing so if they want to stay competitive.”

  And that was why Grandfather made the cursed bunny.

  “It is no sin to make and sell good spirits. But for the alleged crimes of not being connected to powerful people, for not having the capital to make such connections, an entire family was smashed to pieces and its remains scattered to the winds.”

  Grandfather shakes his head. “My friend was so good, so kind, so dedicated to his company, and devoted to his wife … He was such a lovely friend …” Despite having told this story scores of times, Grandfather’s voice always trembles when he gets to this part, his eyes turning red. “To murder them all, to destroy a family … How can such things be allowed?”

  But such things are indeed allowed, and such people who allow it are everywhere. Which is exactly why my grandfather, my father, and I could make a living out of cursed fetishes.

  But to my grandfather, I say nothing. As always, I simply listen to his story, so familiar from having heard it many times.

  The target of the curse has to touch the cursed fetish with their own hands. That’s the most important aspect of any cursed fetish and the trickiest part in getting it to work. Grandfather summoned all his connections, high and low, to get in touch with someone who knew someone who knew yet another someone who worked for a subcontractor for the company that killed his friend. He asked the first someone to hand deliver the bunny lamp to the competitor company’s CEO. There was a switch embedded in the back of the bunny that made the light turn on when stroked like a real live pet rabbit.

  This someone who knew someone who knew yet another someone did as he was told. He visited the competitor company’s CEO and said the lamp was a gift from the subcontractor company, demonstrating the on and off switch with gloved hands. The CEO simply nodded his head, distracted by some papers he was signing, took a call passed on from his assistant, and abruptly left his office saying he had a meeting with a member of the National Assembly.

  This someone who knew someone who knew yet another someone had no choice but to leave the bunny lamp behind in the CEO’s office. On his way out, he implored the CEO’s assistant sitting outside to not let anyone touch the lamp except the CEO, but as he was merely a nobody who worked for a subcontractor, the assistant simply nodded her head like her boss had done and went back to reading her magazine.

  Grandfather, having heard what had happened, sighed as it occurred to him that the course of the curse would be altered slightly.

  But he figured as long as the cursed bunny was somewhere in the CEO’s house or office it wasn’t a complete failure.

  The bunny lamp stood on a table in the CEO’s office for a day until being moved to the company warehouse when the workers were preparing to go home. That night, the bunny nibbled at any paper in the warehouse—cardboard boxes, crumpled newspapers used as packing filler, stacks of old documents, account books going back years, all of it. No one came to the warehouse at night, so the bunny nibbled away undisturbed.

  The next morning when the warehouse guard opened the doors, the floor was strewn with bits of paper and rabbit droppings. The guard muttered something about rats and buying rat poison as he cleaned up the mess.

  The bunny, still unnoticed in the corner of the warehouse, nibbled at archived papers all through the next night as well. The guard occasionally passed by outside as the bunny munched through the warehouse, and the night watchman also went about as usual with a flashlight in his hand, but the two men only glanced into the small window of the warehouse door; no one could imagine what was happening inside. Once the bunny had chewed up every bit of paper in the warehouse, it started on the wood.

  A guard glimpsed something white in the warehouse. It looked like a fluffy bit of cotton, but it disappeared as he approached it. He figured a draft had blown it away. The next day, the little white object had become three, and then six the day after that. The guard thought the retreating white figures seemed to hop just like rabbits, but wild rabbits couldn’t possibly be living in that part of the city. He thought nothing of it—there were trucks that needed to be loaded for deliveries to branch offices. The guard, branch worker, truck driver— none of them noticed the white-with-black-tipped-ears-and-tail bunnies that hopped aboard with the crates of alcohol.

  Soon after, the warehouses of both the headquarters and the branches, as well as retailers, reported some kind of infestation that resulted in chewed-up paper and wood and pea-sized droppings everywhere. Mousetraps and rat poison were of no use, not even cats helped. Someone glanced at the droppings and remarked that they were too large for rats and looked more like the work of rabbits. The woman who presented this accurate opinion worked as a clerk and had a niece in elementary school who raised rabbits for some kind of nature class, and she had visited the hutch a few times to feed them dried grass. But no one in the branches and no retailers had seen any rabbits inside the warehouse, and the clerk was no rabbit expert, just some woman who spent her days taking inventory and fetching coffee until she would inevitably quit to get married. Everyone ignored her.

  The company headquarters and all the branches forced every employee to participate in a rat-catching campaign across the warehouses. Many rats were indeed caught, and the campaign, while leaving the workers exhausted, did result in cleaner warehouses. But all it took was another night for the warehouse floors to be littered with shredded paper as well as animal droppings too big to be from rats.

  As paper kept getting damaged, the company decided to move their most important documents, like old account books and factory blueprints, to their offices. While they did so, no one noticed that the white bunnies with black-tipped ears and tails, invisible under the daylight sun, were also moving into the office.

  A rumor spread that the distillery was overrun with mice. As so much of the local population worked across the company—at the headquarters, branches, warehouses, and the factory—it was inevitable that word got out in the area.

  One branch fired a warehouse worker as a warning while another division brought all of their workers together in one room and begged them to be careful about spreading rumors. The dismissed worker happened to be taking care of his old, bedridden mother as well as three sons and five younger siblings, and he was later caugh
t by the night watchman when he broke into the warehouse with a container full of gasoline to set fire to the place. Meanwhile, in the region where they had gathered workers to lecture them on spreading rumors, a full-page opinion piece appeared in the local newspaper about the dangers of rats when it came to food sanitation.

  News about the “rat” problem spread like wildfire all over the region, and the company decided to host a tasting event when they determined they were past the point where threatening their workers was effective. They came up with a plan where workers and their families, people who lived near the facilities, and most importantly, the pillars of the community and other important persons of the region were plied with spirits from the warehouse and shown how there was no problem with the sanitation or quality of their product and how much the company was contributing to the local community.

  The event was held on the lawns of the headquarters. The CEO himself attended, as did his son the vice-president who had a child in elementary school. The CEO’s grandson, bored with the long speeches, the loud music, and most of all the drinking the adults were indulging in, slipped away to wander around the company grounds. The CEO’s daughter-in-law found him crouched before an open door of the warehouse. “I was playing with the bunnies.” She asked where they were. The boy dragged her into the warehouse by the hand. He pointed at a bunny lamp perched on top of a dusty steel filing cabinet and begged her to let him take it home.

  His mother said they needed to ask his grandfather because the object belonged to the company, and she quickly forgot about it as she dragged her son back to the outdoor event. But the boy didn’t forget. His drunk grandfather, upon hearing what the boy said to him about wanting a strange object in the warehouse, told him to go ahead before turning back to drinking with the important adults.

  The PR event was a success. Everyone stayed late, drinking the free alcohol into the wee hours of the night. Having endured it for as long as she could, the CEO’s daughter-in-law left with the child when he began whining from exhaustion. The boy hugged the bunny lamp tightly in the car that took him home.

  The “rat” rumor seemed like it had finally been laid to rest, and the fundamental reason for the rumors—the bunny lamp—had been moved from the warehouse to the house of the CEO’s son.

  But the bunnies that had already spread throughout the company’s branches and retailers’ warehouses did not go away. The ones that had moved into the offices with the documents didn’t go away either. They continued to multiply and chew up everything in sight.

  Every night inside the drawers and steel cabinets, all manner of documents—order forms, contracts, business performance reviews, account books, and financial statements— were chewed to shreds.

  Even when the most important documents were moved into the vault, the cash, cheques, and promissory notes within began to get chewed up as well.

  The company undertook a building-wide professional extermination, dumping all of their things on the lawns including the contents of the vault. As all this went on, the CEO’s grandson did his homework by the light of the bunny lamp at home and slept in a bed right next to it. The boy loved the cute lamp of the bunny sitting beneath a tree and bragged to his friends that his grandfather had been gifted it from overseas. The CEO’s grandson touched the lamp several times a day, stroking the bunny’s back in order to switch the light on and off.

  The bunny did not chew up the paper in the house of the CEO’s son.

  It chewed up something else instead.

  The CEO’s grandson was in his last year of elementary school. Aside from being smaller than average for his age, he was a strong boy with no history of illness. According to his mother, he was a nice enough child who enjoyed going to school and did well in his studies, albeit a little too enthusiastic about kicking a ball around instead of doing his homework or cramming for exams.

  No one paid much attention at first when he began to forget his homework and school materials. He was the grandson of the brewery owner and had always been a good student; the teacher didn’t scold him so much as nag him. But the child soon began to forget not only his homework but the fact that he had been assigned it in the first place, and in a burst of irritation he lashed out at his teacher, prompting a call home. “Please keep in mind that children enter puberty early these days and can get moody,” the teacher said to the mother, and the mother acquiesced.

  Around the end of winter vacation, the boy began obsessing over food. He insisted he hadn’t eaten when he clearly had, stole food from the fridge, hid snacks around the house, and threw screaming fits when his mother tried to take the food away. His family assumed it was because he was a growing boy. Thinking he might be going through a growth spurt, they bought more food, and a greater variety at that, but the boy’s greed, paranoia, and temper only worsened.

  Then, on the first day of school in the spring, the boy got lost on his way home. It was the same path he had walked every school day for the past six years, a distance he could cover in ten minutes, fifteen at most.

  A neighbor found him sitting in the middle of the road, dazed from having wandered around the vicinity of the school for a long time. The boy smelled terrible. The neighbor who brought him to his mother, embarrassedly mentioned that the boy seemed to have soiled his pants, and she turned around and quickly walked away before the boy’s mother could even recover from the shock and thank her.

  The boy’s parents took him to see a doctor. Their local pediatrician recommended they take him to a larger hospital. But even the university hospital in the city could not find anything wrong, this being a time before MRI scans. The pediatrician at the university hospital did observe, however, that the child’s eyes seemed unfocused as he rocked back and forth mumbling unintelligibly, and that he had peed himself where he sat. The doctor recommended consulting a psychiatrist. His chair fell on its side as the child's father jumped to his feet and cried, “Are you suggesting my son is mad!” His face turning crimson, the father screamed the most wretched curses at the doctor as he pushed aside his pleading wife and swept up his child in his arms before leaving the hospital. The blameless mother tearfully begged the doctor for his forgiveness as she bowed several times before following her husband out.

  The child’s condition only grew worse after their visit to the university hospital. The child could no longer recognize his parents’ faces, repeatedly soiled his trousers, could not walk properly, and kept muttering to himself but no longer formed meaningful words. He spent most of his day lying in bed and staring up at the ceiling with unfocused eyes, gurgling now and then, but the one thing he consistently did was obsess over the bunny lamp. The bunny lamp was moved from his desk to his nightstand, and the child, while mumbling at the ceiling, turned to look at the lamp from time to time, which seemed to reassure him, and he became anxious and screamed whenever anyone else tried to touch it.

  While he slept, the child would sometimes wriggle his nose, nibble, or flick his ears like a bunny, but none of the adults around him noticed. In his dreams, the child sat under a tree with a white rabbit with black-tipped ears and tail, pleasantly eating away at his own brain. The more he nibbled away at it, the narrower the child’s world became until he was unable to leave the little bit of land he shared under the tree with the bunny. By then, he could not comprehend anything except for his delight in being with his friend.

  As the CEO’s grandson slowly died on the bed next to the bunny lamp, the seasons changed, as did the government and the world. The people who had enabled the CEO to monopolize the liquor market with his cheap and tasteless spirits lost their positions of power. The company, for the first time since its founding, was hit with a tax audit.

  By that point, the invisible bunnies had shredded the company’s performance reviews, account books, financial statements, and daily memorandums. Every operating profit notification, every record of taxes paid to the National Tax Service, everything was in pieces and completely illegible.

  The bunnies
had moved on to the wallpaper of the office building, leaving teeth marks on the walls and doors. The company’s important documents were now nothing but a pile of hamster bedding, and the building itself began to look shabby. It was clear to the workers that the company, both inside and out, was falling apart. But the CEO refused to acknowledge this and continued to turn a blind eye.

  For a long time, the CEO’s grandson lay in bed staring up at the ceiling with unfocused eyes, breathing and doing nothing else.

  Then one day, the child stopped breathing.

  Returning home from the elaborate funeral they’d held for his son, the father locked himself in his dead son’s room and wept for a long time. He placed the bunny lamp his son had loved so much on his lap and wailed his son’s name again and again as he stroked it.

  The National Tax Service determined that the company not only had to pay back all the taxes it had skillfully avoided in the past but even the taxes it had actually paid, plus interest. No matter how desperately the company tried to prove they had paid the latter, the company didn’t have a single legible document to submit as evidence.

  When whispers began that the company’s operations and financial documents had vanished, its debtors insisted there was no proof they owed the company anything and refused to make payments. At the same time, the company’s creditors demanded they pay up immediately. The CEO was livid. He went to a secret safe where he kept a notebook that only he knew about, a record of all of the company’s assets and bonds and debt documents. But when he opened the safe, he found his trusted secret notebook torn to shreds, chewed to pieces—a pile of useless pulp.

  This should have been the moment when the CEO had a stroke and never regained consciousness. The cursed bunny, however, was not that generous. The CEO did not have a stroke.