She screamed the first time, so loud that the old man who lived in the next apartment arrived at her door with surprising speed, cardigan thrown hastily over his untucked white undershirt, light scent of an evening beer while watching baseball on his breath. The neighbor held her hands and said things to her in a language she didn’t know, even though they’d had accentless conversations before, in the daylight. When she wasn’t suddenly being torn apart, when there wasn’t a sudden gush of blood onto the rag rugs she’d gotten at a garage sale, when there wasn’t a dark bundle on the floor, a wild-eyed hare, full grown, linked to her by a disgusting, fleshy cord that the neighbor cut with a folding knife from his pocket, the blade rippled with honing over the years.
She screamed, too, when she looked into the hare’s eyes, even as she also, in a small quiet rational part of herself, thought that this was probably embarrassing, though she didn’t know what she meant exactly, and screamed once more for good measure. Maybe she meant embarrassing for her neighbor to see her like this, or embarrassing for this hare to be here, but also what she saw when she looked into its eyes harrowed her and looked like rattling keys and flashing red lights, and a cut-off siren, and smelled like antiseptic.
When she stopped screaming that first time, when she came back to herself, her neighbor had her awkwardly cradled in his arms on the floor, her head against his chest. Her hair was plastered to her face with sweat, with tears, with blood, and his undershirt had smears on it too. He smelled like pencil shavings and aftershave and a cigar smoked three days ago and soup cooked in the next room.
“Do you have anybody you can call?” he asked, after a few minutes, as her breathing settled. She turned her head enough to look at the hare, still sitting on the gory rag rug.
“No. No, I don’t know what happened. I never…” She lost the words as she reached for them. She never what? Never slept with anybody? Never virgin-birthed a hare on her living room floor before? Never received a terrible vision of…whatever that was?
But he shushed her, and got her to her feet, and made her walk back and forth until the afterbirth came, also disgusting but it didn’t hurt, and then he bundled the whole bloody mess into the rag rug and took it all down the hall to the garbage chute. The hare lolloped out into the hallway after him. She wondered if she should stop it, keep it, but couldn’t bring herself to touch it. Was terrified to look into its eyes again, as it crouched on the threadbare carpet runner, ears cocked backwards to her, haunches tensed to sprint away. The cord trailed across the floor, but she wasn’t sure where it attached to the hare. How the hare came to be. Any of it.
“Do you need—”
“I’ll call my doctor in the morning,” she said, arms folded across her stomach against his kindness. She was lying, of course. She didn’t have a doctor. She didn’t have insurance. “Thank you, so much. I don’t know what else I would have done.”
“I had to,” he said plainly, holding up a charm around his neck as though it would mean something to her, and went back next door.
She stood in her doorway, staring at the hare for a long time, until she was cold and shaking, even though their units were always so hot, radiators clanging like hauntings underneath windows that everybody kept cracked even in the middle of winter. She shut the door against it, then turned on the shower as hot as she could stand it, hotter, and stood in there with all her clothes on, and scrubbed at herself for forever.
•••
In the morning, it all seemed impossible, a terrible fever-dream, or she’d been drugged without knowing it, something lacing the paper she pulled out of the mailbox. She pulled her clothes out of the tub and there were no stains on them. She went to the living room and her rug was gone, still, but the floor wasn’t stained. She put her hand on the apartment door and couldn’t open it, couldn’t make herself turn the knob. She looked through the glass bubble in the door but couldn’t get the right angle. “You have to,” she said out loud, and that got her unfrozen. She turned the knob, opened the door, and looked out into the hall. No hare. No bloody signs of its passage.
Another door opened and she looked—a woman further up the hall, with her toddler bundled up against the morning chill. Their eyes met, briefly, and that woman gave her the polite-stranger smile and went to the elevator. No indication she heard what went on last night. If it went on last night. She took a deep breath and squared her shoulders, went next door, and knocked. She couldn’t explain anything to him, she couldn’t explain anything to herself, but she could thank him for helping her. He didn’t answer, but that made sense—either he was an early riser, or he was sleeping late after whatever it was happened last night.
The small voice that told her screaming was embarrassing also told her that she knew that wasn’t it, that she knew he was in there, and she ignored it and went about her day. She had to go to work. She couldn’t get health insurance with it, but she made rent with it, data entry in a cubicle form where everybody wore ID lanyards and nobody knew what anybody’s names were, even though they all saw each other every day. She didn’t have work friends. She didn’t have anybody she could pull aside and say, “So something weird happened last night…”
She thought maybe she could stop at a women’s clinic on the way home, but she felt normal now. And what would she say to them? That she gave birth to a rabbit last night? No not a rabbit, definitely a hare. They wouldn’t believe her. Or, worse, they’d feel like they needed to Do Something About Her. No. She went home, and hesitantly got her mail from the box in the downstairs, after letting herself into the building. Had the tiles there always been black and white checkered? They had to have been, nothing about this building had changed in fifty years or more, other than wiring for phone. Internet.
Her neighbor’s mail was still in his box and she looked at it for a long time, filled with unease, and then took a deep breath to steady her resolve and went upstairs. His door was closed, but everybody’s door was always closed. It would’ve been so easy to walk past, and go to her door. It didn’t have to be her problem.
No, she had to. He helped her last night.
She knocked, and listened. Nothing, not even the sense of sudden silence, like somebody trying to avoid being heard, frozen and hoping the knocker went away. She knocked again. He was always home this time, she realized. Always had the news, or a game, going. How was it possible to always have the news or a game on? The internet, probably. Maybe she’d been too quiet, so she knocked again, too loud, and a door down the hall opened. A tall, skinny guy, who moved in to help his aunt, and was able to stay in the rent controlled apartment after she died, stuck his head out.
“What’s going on?” he asked.
“I think…” she trailed off. She knew what she thought, but didn’t know how to lie about how she thought it. “I haven’t seen him at all today, I want to make sure he’s okay.” The guy started to dismiss her, she could feel him doing it, turning away, going back to his apartment where it wasn’t his problem. “He helped me out once, I just want to make sure he’s okay,” she said again.
“I’ll call the super,” he said, pulling out his cell phone like he didn’t know why but also couldn’t fight it.
“Thank you.” She listened at the door, she knocked more, and then the super arrived with his rattling keys and she almost threw up between her feet there in the hallway because it was the same sound from her vision with the hare last night. It was real and this was what the hare was telling her.
Tears were running down her face even before the super had the door all the way open, and he and the guy from down the hall exchanged that look, the “women are so ridiculous” look, the “let’s get this over with so she shuts up” look and then the door didn’t open all the way because her neighbor was laying on the floor, in pajamas, and not the clothes he came to her in last night, the morning paper still rolled up by his outstretched left hand.
The guy from down the hall took one look and started doing the thing where he didn’t touch her, but he stepped into her personal space, herding her to her door. “You don’t need to see this, come on, how about you go to your place,” and she didn’t want to leave, she wanted to bear witness, but she wasn’t strong enough. She chattered her key against the lock until the guy touched her then, taking her hand to help the key slide home, and the super was on his phone and she couldn’t hear what he was saying but she knew what he was saying.
Then the siren, even though they couldn’t save him, the gurney rattling up the hallway, the whiff of antiseptic from the EMTs as they snapped their gloves on. The other tenants in the hallways—questioning, muttering, the baby down the hall crying. Then quiet.
She couldn’t stay here. She couldn’t afford to move. She sat on her couch with her knees drawn up to her chest and hugged herself and cried and she didn’t know how many days later but a knock came at her door and she thought she would leave her body, with how much it startled her.
A little man in a charcoal suit stood at the door, a hat held in both hands, and though she couldn’t say why, she knew he was a lawyer. “Did you know him well?” he asked, jerking his thumb in the direction of next door. He had lots of tattoos on his hands, but she couldn’t look at them long enough to figure them out.
“Just to say hello to,” she said, her voice hoarse with salt and disuse.
“He thought you should have this,” he said, trying to hand her the folding knife. “There’s more, but there’s probate first.”
“I don’t understand.”
“He didn’t have any family. His place was rent controlled and he had stocks and pensions.”
“Okay?”
“He left it to you.” She burst into tears, but the lawyer seemed used to that, and he pressed the knife into her hand and closed her fingers around it, then patted her on the shoulder and went to the elevator.
•••
The second time it happened, she was at work. The pain ripped through her, on her way back to her desk from the break room and its monolithic coffee carafe, and she caught herself before her knees went out completely, coffee mug shattering on the too-thin, plasticky office rug. She couldn’t do this in public, people standing up in their cubicles to look at what the noise was, and she staggered to the exit, blessedly close.
She made it to one of the unisex restrooms, the lights clicking on with the motion sensor, the lock working stiffly under her frantic hands. She tried to scream, in spite of herself, but the next bolt of pain stole her breath and she gave a rustling whimper instead. She dragged her skirt up above her waist, remembering all the blood last time, and then dragged the paper towels out of the protesting, screeching machine, wadding them against her mouth when she got her breath back, scream-sobbing into the wet paper and into her hands and hunching her shoulders into the effort of it.
The sharp edges of all the little tiles dug into her legs as she tried to crouch and then ended up prostrate, hoping distantly that she wasn’t just going to get covered in blood despite her trying to be careful and she thought it just has to end soon, it just has to end, I can’t stand it, it can’t keep going.
It kept going.
It kept going long enough that the lights went out again, as she whimpered into her balled up fists and then finally, finally, it was out. She dragged herself up sitting and the lights snapped back on and she stared at the hare, unable to stop herself, even as she remembered what happened last time. But it was too late, of course.
She stared into the hare’s eyes and it smelled like smoke, and more blood, and sounded like screams and endlessly ringing phones and flashing lights and firecrackers and too big a crowd with too few places to go.
She was coughing from the smoke that wasn’t real when she came back to herself. The hare was still there. She had the strongest, most awful feeling that it was the same hare. As the first time. She fumbled out her neighbor’s knife, that she’d kept on herself like an amulet, and unfolded the blade and held it against the cord, had to close her eyes and consciously stop herself from heaving, and then cut through it with surprising ease. That part, at least, didn’t hurt. Then she remembered about the afterbirth and hauled herself to her feet, using the nearest sink for support even as it wiggled like a sink never should, like a loose tooth hanging out of the wall, and she paced back and forth, avoiding her reflection, avoiding the hare, until the pain came again, no not pain pressure, like every time a doctor or nurse ever lied about something just being a pinch except it wasn’t a lie this time, short and hard and sharp like a sneeze and then it was done except for the cleanup.
She used almost all the paper towels, on the afterbirth, the blood on the floor, and then on her legs, and then on the hare, which let her handle in such a docile way that it made everything that much worse.
Then she looked at herself in the mirror. Her hair, she could get wet and fix. Her clothes were rumpled but could be worse; somehow, they’d escaped the blood. If the blood was real. She felt unhinged, adrift, unmoored from reality. Everything looked fine enough, somehow. Other than that there was a hare on the floor, cleaning its face, trembling as it side-eyed her.
Somebody tried the doorknob, and then knocked, and she startled so hard it felt like somebody hit her. “One minute,” she called.
She looked down at the hare, and it looked back at her. She started to reach for it, looked at her bare hands, and withdrew. She pulled more paper towels out of the dispenser, stood with them in her hands, and then crouched down and picked up the hare in them like she was getting a bug off the floor, and the hare let her pick it up and even though it seemed very large on the floor, and when she was giving birth to it, when she picked it up it was smaller all of the sudden, small enough to fit into the cardigan pocket that didn’t hold her phone, so that when she smoothed her hair one last time in the mirror and walked out of the bathroom, no hare was apparent.
Her phone rang as she walked back to her cubicle, a no-no, and heads turned again as she ducked down, sat in her chair, and answered it.
It was that lawyer. “Probate’s gone through,” he said. “Just need you to sign some things and it’s all yours.”
“What?”
“We’re still inventorying the apartment but, the lease on the apartment, which the building will probably pay you a lot for so they can break the rent control, his bank accounts, his stocks…”
“No, I mean…” she trailed off. She was exhausted, she still smelled the smoke, heard the screams. “Where’s your office? I’ll come right now.”
He told her, and she wrote it down on a post-it note. Then she typed her resignation, hit print, picked up her purse, and walked out.
In the shiny metal elevator, her reflection fun-housed around her as she wrapped her cardigan tighter around herself, and when she got off on the first floor, she took off her keycard lanyard and dropped it onto the security desk as she walked past.
The lawyer’s office wasn’t far. She walked, in the bright sunny day that wasn’t warm but wasn’t cold, and when she came to a grassy corner park, she stopped and looked around. No people right there, right that instant. She reached into her pocket and cupped the hare in her hand, and when she drew it out it was hare-sized again in its paper towel blanket. She crouched and set it in the grass, and it dashed off from her in a straight line before pausing under a bench and cleaning its ears.
She balled the paper towels into the garbage and went to sign the papers.
•••
Her little house was like a child’s shoebox dollhouse. She took comfort in its simplicity but also felt like the house was built as solid outer walls and then temporary stage walls in between splitting the rooms, as if entering the house caused her to enter a play that an unknown writer had staged for an unknown audience. There were little green aprons of front and back yards, and a garage with a blue-painted door, though she did not have a car, and a single tree in the center of the front yard that the real estate agent claimed was a lemon tree, but had not yet borne any fruit. Maybe it was the wrong climate. A trellis of climbing, trumpet-shaped flowers were against the back wall of the house, and they regrew every year, but she wasn’t sure if they were supposed to. She’d never replanted them.
She lived in that house for six months, being careful with her money, shyly making friends with her neighbors, some of whom had raised their families here of the decades, some of whom had moved in and started families. She did not birth any more hares for those six months, and was starting to think maybe she’d just been hallucinating. Maybe there’d been a carbon monoxide leak in that apartment, and that’s what caused it. Or maybe there was mold in the building that she had an allergic reaction to.
Then she went out onto her little concrete stoop one morning and picked up the slim local newspaper, folded in thirds and secured with a rubber band that was wide like linguine, and a cut off word on the folded-over headline looked like the name of her old office, and her stomach did a slow kick and roll over, all on its own, as she shut the door with her back and slid down to sit, staring at the slightly misprinted picture of emergency vehicles in front of her old building, after somebody came in with a gun, and she couldn’t focus long enough to understand if it was an employee or a former employee or somebody else, just that there was a gun, and gunshots, and a fire too, somehow. A year ago, she would’ve been there. Six months ago, she birthed a hare there in the unisex bathroom, after lunch but before quitting time. And then she quit.
She sat there for a long time, long enough for the sunlight to move across the living room wall. She only worked part time at the thrift store down the street, nobody would look for her until tomorrow. She couldn’t stay on her living room floor forever. She stood up and went to the kitchen, then folded the newspaper back into its thirds and put it in her stainless steel sink, then rummaged around in her kitchen drawers, leaving them all hanging open, until she found matches. She broke the first two, but the third lit, and the newspaper caught immediately as though it had always hungered for the flame, turning into orange feathers, and then black ash, and then pale gray ash, and then she ran the faucet over it and poked it all down the drain with the blue silicon spatula she used to make macaroni and cheese. Then she threw the spatula away. Then she fished it back out of the garbage and left it in the sink.
“I could have been there,” she said to her shoebox house. But she wasn’t, because of the hare. Did one awful thing cancel out the other? Balance it? Her stomach rolled and she thought that she’d somehow shocked herself into giving this terrible birth again and she staggered to her feet and made it to the bathroom, with some idea that if it happened in the bathtub she could just wash the mess down the drain, but once she was there, the pain faded. She burped sourly and after a few blank moments got a drink of water, not waiting for it to get truly cold. She kept waiting for the pain to seize her. Or for somebody to burst through the door and shoot her anyway.
None of those things happened. It was dark out now, the bathroom window a dark mirror. Maybe…the hare had warned her. Maybe, both times, the hares had warned her. But why? And why now, and not before the other horrible things that happened to her, the accident that took her parents, the foster system, living where she didn’t know anybody, not even the neighbor in the next apartment who still came and helped when he heard her cry out.
Would it happen again, or had it stopped forever? Was it because of the neighbor?
•••
More months passed. A year, two years. Enough time for her trumpet shaped flowers to grow back twice, enough time for her to think that there really must have been some kind of poisoning or something that made her think she’d given birth to hares and gotten some kind of prophecy from them. Enough time for her to see a guy a couple of times, an actually nice guy who had a sadness to his eyes and hesitance with her, as though she, or the idea of a relationship, were a thing to handle with extreme care. She appreciated that. She was starting to feel safe with him. They’d laughed together.
He brought her home after dinner one night, and then, in her soft front porch light, asked if he could kiss her. Nobody had ever asked before. Shyly, happily, she said yes, and he did. And then he looked deeply into her eyes, and said goodnight, and went back to his car, though he didn’t pull away until she unlocked her door and went inside.
She closed the door and locked it behind her and then was driven to her knees by the knifing, rolling cramps in her stomach, her keys skittering on the floor, her purse spilling to the side. Her breath caught in her throat as she tried to moan, or scream, or deny it was happening. She thought she was done with this. She thought it wasn’t real after all.
Was it shorter this time? She couldn’t tell. There was just the pain, and her body being taken from her, to do this thing. She arched against her wooden floor and kicked her rug askew, knocking the coffee table over, and then it was done.
She sat up, pushed her sweat-soaked hair off of her face with shaking hands. Sweat, or tears? Both. Why did this happen to her? She fumbled for the knife, which she always had with her. She never used it for anything else, not to open mail, or boxes, or cut string. She cut the cord and wiped the tears out of her eyes with the backs of her wrists and then looked at what had come out of her.
It was a small brown rabbit, crouching on her floor in a little fuzzy ball, little ears tucked back against its head. She looked into its big brown eyes, and she heard laughter and felt warmth. She saw strangers coming to her door, her neighbors, who she hadn’t met yet but only glimpsed as they left for work. She saw happiness, felt it in a way that she only remembered in dreams of childhood.
The rabbit was cupped, quivering, in her hands, and her tears dropped on its fur. She caught her breath, and listened to her clock in the kitchen tick. Unlike the hares, which she didn’t even want to touch in the first place, she didn’t want to put the rabbit down. But she had to, to clean up. It crouched by her front door, where she’d dropped her purse, as she put towels down, but then filled her mop bucket. It didn’t flinch as she moved things and went back and forth between rooms, exhausted but driven. The pain was gone, that was a blessing, the pain was always gone once it was over.
Finally, all the blood was gone, and she’d put the towels in a garbage bag and then bagged it again and then bagged that again, she nudged the rabbit away from the front door so she could open it. It moved easily, pliant, trusting, and she stroked a finger down its back just to feel the soft fur again before opening the door.
It hopped outside almost immediately, not like it was fleeing, but just that it expected to go. There was an order to things. She watched the rabbit crouch in the grass just off her front walk, and when it didn’t move any further right away, took the garbage bag out to the big square garbage can that the service left for her, the plastic edges still sharp in their newness. When she turned back around, the rabbit was gone, but her feeling of calm happiness remained.
