Angel, the Rabbit
The girl walks her rabbit through Willowbrook Park at 3:42 PM on a Thursday, during school hours, and no one stops her.
The leash is pink leather threaded with silver bells no bigger than baby teeth. Every step shakes loose a faint ting ting ting, the sound of champagne flutes touching in a room where everyone is lying. The rabbit weighs twenty-three pounds. Its fur holds the white of hospital corridors, of teeth in toothpaste commercials. Its body moves with a liquid delay under all that fur, joints arriving a half-second after the rest of it.
She leads it past the playground where mothers cluster around the slide. Past the fountain that quit during last year's budget cuts, its basin holding a green inch of rainwater and three pennies. The girl's patent leather Mary Janes cost eighty dollars. Jacadi dress, the kind mothers buy to make other mothers feel underdressed at birthday parties. Her braids pull so tight the skin bunches where blonde meets scalp, the welts there raised and pink. Someone did this to her this morning while she stood still as a coat rack.
Ten yards behind them, a man follows.
His Brooks Brothers shirt is two seasons old, the left cuff carrying a stain from this morning's coffee. His suit jacket hangs crooked because of what weighs down the right pocket. In his left pocket, his thumb works the rim of a bronze sobriety chip, six months, the edge catching his wedding band with each turn.
Tick. Tick. Tick.
Eleven minutes at ten yards. His stride holds the same length each time, heel to toe, shoulders level, breathing even. His pupils stay wide in the daylight. The air around him carries cologne applied three hours ago, sandalwood and vetiver, the sour note his dry cleaner can never quite reach.
"His name's Angel."
She watches the rabbit nose through a crumpled wrapper some jogger dropped.
The man's stride stutters. Recovers. The chip turns faster against the band.
"I named him after Mommy."
The rabbit's ears swivel, two furred dishes scanning separate frequencies. Under the girl's fingernails, dirt packs deep, the red clay you find forty minutes north where the earth opens into color that stains everything it touches and holds whatever you give it.
The man closes to nine yards. Eight.
"Why not Daddy?"
"Daddy's in the ground."
She says it the way she'd recite Columbus sailed in 1492. She bends to stroke the rabbit, each finger tracing its own line along the spine, playing a scale on a keyboard only she can read.
"He's been there since Monday."
The man laughs. The sound lives in hotel bars past midnight, men sitting alone with their second scotch, explaining to bartenders why they're not home.
"Monday."
"Monday's a good day for digging." She doesn't look up. Her fingers find the spot behind the rabbit's ears where the fur grows softest, and she works it there, and the rabbit leans its full weight into her palm. "The ground's softer on Mondays."
"Is that so?” He moves to seven yards. His shadow stretches ahead of him across the asphalt and reaches for hers.
"Angel likes Mondays."
"Angel looks happy," the man says.
"Angel's always happy." She scratches behind one ear, and the rabbit tilts its head to keep her fingers in the right spot, its eyes half-closing, its weight sinking deeper into the ground. "Even when he's scared."
"Scared of what?"
The girl lifts her hand. The rabbit opens its eyes.
"Rabbits don't scream, did you know that?"
Tick. Tick. The bronze sweats in his palm.
"They just shake." Her voice drops. Three crows launch from an oak, black punctuation against the afternoon. "Staying quiet makes them brave."
"Quiet is good." His right hand shifts in the weighted pocket. His teeth show. "The world's too loud."
"Too loud," she echoes, and the echo swallows the playground noise, the distant tennis balls, the traffic beyond the trees.
"Do you go to Merriam Elementary? I volunteer there sometimes." His voice arrives a half-beat too fast, the warmth in it landing too even. "Reading buddies. Third graders love it."
"I know what school I go to."
"Of course you do." Six yards. "I just meant—"
"You don't volunteer."
His face falls faster than it can rebuild. What lives underneath gets a full second of afternoon before the mouth remembers its shape.
"That's not very nice," he says.
"No."
She turns around.
Her eyes hold the blue of nursery walls. They lock onto his. Her left eye twitches once, a shutter opening and closing, and in the photograph it takes, everything about him develops on contact.
"Yeah," he says. The word rides out on breath he didn't mean to spend.
She tilts her head to the right. The braid shifts against her neck, exposing the bruises underneath: purple fading to green at the edges, layered, the strata of weeks. The rabbit goes still. Twenty-three pounds of stillness, denser than stone. Its eyes catch his. Red where the light should make them pink. He has the feeling of standing near an open oven door, the heat arriving before the smell.
The man's knees lock.
He stands in his body the way people stand in elevators during power outages. His mouth floods with a taste like wet iron filings, the saliva pooling too fast to swallow.
She straightens up. The leash wraps her fist.
"Angel doesn't like you."
She says it in playground cadence, the singsong of jump rope rhymes and choosing games, ring-around-the-rosie, ashes, ashes.
He forces words through his throat. "Rabbits don't like anyone."
"That's not true." She crouches beside the rabbit and presses her lips to its fur, right at the base of the ear where the cartilage thins to translucence. The ear cups toward her mouth. She whispers into it, and the syllables that reach the air carry consonants that click and drag and pool.
The oaks lean. Their shadows shift without wind. The temperature on the path drops four degrees in two seconds, and the man's breath fogs, and he can see hers, and the rabbit's breath does not fog at all.
The rabbit's throat opens. A single note comes out, high and clean and endless, the resonance of a chamber larger than any body on the path. Twenty-three pounds should not have room to hold it.
"What did you say to it?"
His voice cracks on the last word. He is twelve at the chalkboard, the class laughing.
She does not answer.
The leash goes slack. It pools on the asphalt.
The rabbit hops forward. One hop. Two. Each landing settles lower, the center of gravity dropping somewhere no field guide has ever charted. Its fur ripples against the direction of the breeze.
The rabbit's mouth opens. Its teeth are the yellow of old piano keys. The mouth stretches wide, and the man sees the rows, and the man's legs will not move, and what the rows suggest about the throat behind them keeps his eyes from closing.
The chip stops mid-turn. His thumb will not move.
Ting. Ting. Ting.
Six inches from his shoes. Kenneth Cole knockoffs, purchased online after the real pair needed disposal. He has a method for shoes.
The rabbit tilts its head. Its nose twitches once, twice, pressing the air the way a thumb presses fruit for the give.
The girl giggles, a music box winding down, gears stripping in honey.
"Angel knows."
The rabbit gathers itself. Twenty-three pounds compress into a coil that stores more energy than the mass should permit, and the compression makes a sound, a low crack like a knuckle popping in a quiet room, like a branch taking weight it was never meant to hold. The man's hand closes around the object in his right pocket and draws it half an inch before his wrist stops answering.
His wrist does not care what his fingers remember.
The rabbit leaps.
His knees strike the asphalt. Something warm soaks through his trousers. The chip slips from his fingers and rolls across the path, bronze catching the afternoon, and the light it throws crosses what pools beneath him. The air fills with salt and rust. His mouth opens and what comes out has no words in it, a sound that belongs to the part of the body that logged the first tick tick tick of the chip against the band and filed it under the distance closing in the wrong direction.
Ting.
The park absorbs the rest. The swings creak. A mother calls a name. A tennis ball strikes the court beyond the trees.
Ting.
Softer now.
The girl waits. She adjusts her braid where it has come loose and tucks a strand behind one ear.
When the rabbit returns to her side, it sits and cleans its teeth. The pink tongue extends farther than anatomy allows, curling between each tooth, one by one, taking its time. Red on white, vivid as a candy stripe. It looks up at her. She reaches down and scratches behind its ear, and the rabbit leans into her hand, pressing its full weight against her palm, and its eyes close, and its nose twitches, and for one held second the afternoon is just a girl and her rabbit in the sun, and the sun is warm, and the bells are quiet.
She picks up the leash. The bells find their rhythm.
They walk on. Behind them, the asphalt holds a stain that could be anything: oil, rust-colored water, a shadow thrown by clouds that have already moved on. The chip sits at its edge, face-up, the Roman numeral VI catching the afternoon light. On the far side of the playground, a toddler points toward the path and says a word his mother has never taught him, and she lifts him against her chest and walks to the parking lot without turning around.
The girl hums. The rabbit's ears follow the tune, the two of them locked into a frequency the rest of Willowbrook Park cannot receive.
It is Thursday. 4:03 PM. School lets out in twelve minutes.
Angel is always hungry before dinner.
This short story is part of my compilation, Dream City and Other Stories.
Dream City and Other Stories
Dream City and Other Stories collects forty-two stories like this one. Some of them are worse.
