Literary

RABBITS

BY Zachary Baytosh ILLUSTRATION Georgianna Stoukides DESIGN Amos Jackson

Alexa could not remember when she began to allow the rabbits to sleep with her, in their bed, when Rob was away. It had been sometime at the end of April, she knew. Sometime after her birthday, which they had spent mostly in the car, driving back from Rob’s parent’s house in the country, but definitely before their anniversary. She knew because she had slept with the rabbits that night—the night of their anniversary. Rob had had an exam the next morning, early, and so he couldn’t stay. The drive would have been too long, back to school the next morning, and he needed the rest. It was an important exam. So she had slept alone, the night of their anniversary, with the rabbits curled up in their empty sheets. It was comforting, that was all. Like a stuffed animal: warm, soft. Sleeping with a stuffed animal wasn’t that strange.

That wasn’t the first time she had slept with them though—the rabbits. She was already used to it by then, she remembered. She had been sort of looking forward to it, actually, when she’d kissed Rob goodbye as he left—it was long past ten, and he had done the dishes for her, so all she had to do was fold the pile of laundry, still sitting on the living room couch, tidy up a bit, undress, and go to sleep. She had been looking forward to it, that was the point: getting the rabbits out of their cardboard box in the closet, where she kept them when Rob was over. Rob had made up for it in the end—their anniversary. He was sweet like that. He had showed up with flowers the next Friday night. They’d made a weekend of it. They stayed in all day, both days, watched movies; Rob had brought her breakfast in bed. The rabbits had stayed hidden away then.

Hidden wasn’t the word Alexa would have used. Alexa hadn’t told Rob about the rabbits yet. She couldn’t remember the reason. Maybe there wasn’t one. She just hadn’t told him. It wasn’t like she was embarrassed about it—she really wasn’t. There was nothing to be embarrassed about. Plenty of people had rabbits. Plenty of people slept with their pets. Dogs and things. It was good for you. She knew she had read about it when she was still in school—back when she and Rob had first met—though why or when she couldn’t remember. Rob might have known. They’d been in the same program and he always had a memory for things like that: book titles and birthdays and dates and names.

But she just hadn’t told him. That was all. They weren’t even a secret, really—the rabbits. She had kept them in the closet at first, a space-saving device. It wasn’t about hiding them. It was a small apartment after all, and for some reason the closet was practically walk in—well, not really walk in, but spacious. It was big, that was the point. It had been a good place to put the box. And anyway, it wasn’t like the door was locked—what was one of theirs was both of theirs, they were both very firm on that—he could have looked inside anytime. She wasn’t hiding them. She just hadn’t told him. They had been a gift.

Rob had been in the city, at his roommate’s apartment—his apartment, rather—when she had gotten them. That she definitely remembered. They hadn’t really talked that weekend, not that they had been avoiding each other, they just hadn’t talked, minus a quick call Saturday night to check in—he was always really sweet about that—but that barely even counted anymore. And the rabbits didn’t come up— that weekend, during their call. She was meaning to tell him, to talk to him about them, but what was she supposed to do? Drop the rabbits into the conversation straight away? “Oh honey! how was your day? by the way: rabbits.”

But then, after the hellos, their conversation took a different turn: something his professor had said that he thought she would appreciate, and oh, how that same professor was getting married—married again, that is—to Professor Horrowitz, did Alexa remember her? Professor Horrowitz from child development, she’d started teaching the same semester that Alexa had declared and—yes, yes she did remember her, though not well, she never did much with child development, and wow isn’t she like, like, twenty years younger than him?—and he said that he knew, right? and he guessed that love really was blind, though not as blind as Professor Horrowitz’s husband would be soon, sorry, only joking, a bad joke—she still laughed—and wasn’t it amazing all these people getting married: even Pete and Anna had gotten married, and, did you know? Franz and Ellie—wait, really? since when?—and soon everyone would be hitched and there’d be no one left, ha-ha, and that it was time for him to go now. He loved her so much. And where, in all of that, was she going to find time to explain to him how her friend—co-worker— acquaintance really, had given her two beautiful, white rabbits.

They really were beautiful. They were small things: soft and innocent, gentle, warm. They made her feel comfortable, just looking at them. And their eyes could melt your heart.

His kid had won them—he had said—at a fair. But his wife, well she had seen his wife at Clarence’s retirement party: pale and sickly and beautiful—he loved her but...Alexa knew how she was. Pretty picky. Doesn’t do well with “rodents.” He needed to find a place for them, and he’d seen them, and well, he said that they’d made him think of her. So… if she wanted… she could. The offer was always open…

She had taken him up on it. It was an impulsive thing—she hadn’t even thought to check with Rob. Anyway, it was her apartment, and the rabbits were small. Her co-worker—acquaintance—friend helped her move the box from the back of his car to the back of her car. After work, all alone out in the parking lot. No, don’t worry, he had it, he’d moved her hands, the rabbits’ dark eyes looking up at her.

And after that first phone call, when she didn’t tell Rob, it became harder to bring them up. Rob stayed the night that Monday, but she forgot to mention it—she really did. She’d been excited to see him, to talk. And she had fed the rabbits before he came and they got to talking about other things, mostly about his work and school, really, and he was already asleep by the time the thought of them crept back into her mind and she got up, careful not to wake him, to check on them and give them food and water. She spent some time sitting in the warm closet, with the soft yellow light on and the door open just a crack, caressing them, gently. He didn’t stir when she got back into bed. He didn’t seem to notice she was gone.

The next morning, she was tired and he said he had a headache and they made and ate breakfast almost in silence—a companionable silence, of course, chewing on toast. He took her plate and threw out the last crust, overdone, which she hadn’t gotten around to eating yet, and washed it and downed three Advil. Then he left, back to university for the rest of the week. Just like that it was a secret. Of course, they didn’t keep secrets, but she didn’t try to tell him about them after—she would have had to explain why she hadn’t told him about them before. She would have, of course. Explained it. She would have told him all about it if he had asked. But he never asked, and anyway, they were only rabbits.

How long had it taken her to move her late night visits from the closet, to dozing on the floor with the rabbits in her arms, to the empty bed? That was what she could not recall. It was after the first litter had been born. She knew that. Perhaps they were already grown. Had it been weeks? a month or two? since that night in the parking lot. She could not remember. The litter had been large, and largely unintentional. She had named them at first, the two rabbits, Chester and Evan. They were Chester and Evelyn now. Her co-worker hadn’t told her about that.

She hadn’t bothered to name their children: eight rabbits in all, all pale white with the same deep dark eyes as their parents. The same eyes which made something go soft down in her chest. There were too many to keep straight. She had told her friend—co-worker— about it and he’d smiled. “Well, I guess you’re a grandmother now.” He’d said. She’d never liked that: when people talked about their pets like they were children. It seemed desperate, sad, but she smiled too. There were so many of them, she’d said. Eight children. “Eight?” he’d said. “Better get rid of some of them, three is too much.” He’d been talking about his own kids, joking. She’d seen them, in the single photograph on the desk in his office, facing inwards, next to the ceramic paperweight in the shape of an apple and a mug full of mismatched pens. The paperweight had a bite taken out of it, sharp edged and glittering in the overhead. She’d laughed at his comment and she wasn’t sure why. Two weeks after that—no, maybe three?—had been her and Rob’s anniversary, and the car ride, and the night alone.

So it was somewhere in there then, that she’d started sleeping with the rabbits, that she’d brought them into her bed. At first, it was only once in awhile. When she needed them—they were a comfort—like on the night of their anniversary. Or when she was cold—it was winter after all. And then slowly it was every night. And at first it was only a rabbit or two, but

then she began to worry. She began to worry that the other rabbits perhaps felt unattended to, not suitably loved, that they would wander. And so it became two, and then three, and then it was every rabbit, a pile of smooth white fur and dark sweet eyes, that rose and fell in the night with their collective breath.

And it became harder to hide them. Not that she hid them. But it became more obvious that the rabbits were there, in her room and in her bed, and that they were there often, the thick white hairs, first times two, then times ten shedding off and lodging themselves in the cracks in the floorboards, clinging to carpets and to her favorite black dress which she kept hung and ready on the back of the closet door for their dates, just in case—her and Robert’s dates. And then the second litter came. It was not long after the first, but long enough that she had been bringing all of the rabbits to sleep with her at night for some time now, and now there were sixteen, eighteen? Nearly too many to count, all piled in the box in her closet, a wriggling mass of white fur and pink noses and deep, dark, gentle eyes. The box began to stink, began to reek, and so she threw it out in the dumpster, in the parking lot after work. It stank too badly to use her own trash. And she asked if maybe her acquaintance, her co-worker knew how to get the smell of rabbit urine out of a carpet.

But instead he smiled and said he had to go. He had gotten them at a fair, remember? His boy had gotten them. He didn’t know much about taking care of rabbits. And she was left scouring the internet before she finally gave up and used baking soda and vinegar and scrubbed and scrubbed the closet and her car and her clothes until they smelled like slightly vinegary urine and still she slept with the rabbits every night— because it was cold outside that December.

She got a new cardboard box, and then two more, so there were three boxes filled with rabbits now in her tiny apartment. And she put one in the closet, and one underneath the bed, and another in the pantry, and she insisted on cooking when Rob came over even though she loved it when he cooked. He didn’t mind though. He let her cook, and he did the dishes instead, and he never even came near the pantry. And still the closet smelled. If Rob noticed, he didn’t comment. Anyway, old apartments in out of the way places aren’t known for the fragrant smells. School was busy and so there was too little time to talk about trivial things, and he was gone so fast, and there so infrequently, a few days a week at most, that maybe, possibly, he didn’t even notice the change. By now all the rabbits were fully grown, and she had lost track which was Chester and which was Evan, or Evelyn, in the wriggling sea of noses and eyes and in the moving of box to box. The next litter was not long to come. Had she wanted to undo what she had done, to give the first two at least back to her co-worker, to have divided up the rest and sold them off or given them away. Had she wanted that, she wouldn’t have even been able to identify the right ones. Still, something prevented her from doing anything at all. She could have done it. She could’ve given them away. It wouldn’t have been that hard. She could have told Rob even, come clean, surely he would have helped—he was sweet like that. But she didn’t and he didn’t and the rabbits stayed and the rabbits multiplied, as rabbits do.