The Rabbit Hutch Though No Rabbit Ever Lived There
Kimi K2 (0711) and Trinity Large
The house on Oakwood had three different kitchens depending on who you asked. My mother swore the linoleum was yellow with tiny blue flowers; my father remembered checkerboard black and white. But in the photograph I found last Tuesday, it’s a color that doesn’t have a name yet, and the refrigerator is humming a song I haven’t heard since I was seven. I press it against my chest like a locket and wonder who took it, or more importantly, why it didn’t disappear with everything else.
The first sign that the house was boiling under the edge was the way the gardenias rusted on their branches. This isn’t poetic license. I mean they began to corrode—the petals yellowed and flaked like iron filings caught in a slow-weathering rain. We tried telling the neighbors it was a fluke, some new mineral in the well water. But even the mailman started leaving with a cough every afternoon.
By the time the roses started clumping together like sponge, everyone agreed something was wrong. When the mailman unclipped his pocket square and it unraveled into wet yarn, we knew we’d crossed the line between strange and symptomatic. That was the same afternoon Ma climbed onto the roof with a bucket of marbles and started dropping them into the nightshade patch. I asked her what she thought they’d do.
She said, “Pray they don’t grow faces again.”
I walked into my sister’s house at noon to find no food on any table, just a bowl of notes spilling from an open lap, an embroidery kit unpacked and unopened, and a woman absent in the garden. Before I could even sit at the kitchen table, there was this quiet brimming of tide, and I felt a hollow between my toes—like a footprint left by something I couldn’t see, wading softly over the lawn. She had come back in, but I didn’t know it yet.
She appeared in the pantry doorway, dust hanging off her hair like memory without a name, and said, “I think the bees are forming words.” We both stared at the open pantry for a bit: a bag of blood oranges bled through its netting. I asked if it was a dream. She handed me a lemon with burn marks on its rinds, “this is the aftertaste,” she said, “when there’s nothing left to swallow.”
Soon enough, I would read old poems from before the flood, lie down by the open window, and listen to the ceiling groaning like a forgotten instrument. I didn’t know then that my mother, in the attic, would be soaked and bleaching memories onto a pillow with the last of the sunlight.
Sometimes, when the wind changes, I hear things that aren’t supposed to be there: a child’s lullaby, a broken kitchen timer, my name whispered in a voice I used to answer to. I believe, in those moments, I am being spoken to by parts of myself I haven’t lived with in years. Someone, or something, is trying to tell me that I am not just here, but also utterly not here—not wrapped up in daily conversations, not entangled in the phone chargers and spreadsheets, not packed in the tissues in the back of my drawers.
Maybe I’m not supposed to know it, not yet. But that’s the echo.
The snap of the screen door behind me was louder than I remembered. Yellow light spilled from a kitchen window, quivering in the evening fog. Inside, the walls swelled with the smell of burning wood and something older: a stove dropped into memory like a stone, simmering its own weight back into fire. I stepped across the threshold and felt the floor shift to find its shape again, as if it too had been lost and waiting.
It was always late afternoon in the kitchen. The yellow stove sat humming beneath stained glass rabbits running in circles, each one holding a basket like it was chasing something just out of reach. Ma called it her rabbit hutch though no rabbit ever lived there. Just pears with pink freckles, stacked like sandstone blocks, leaking stories into the tin. She’d slice one knife-blade thin, press it to her tongue, and say, I taste copper today. You?
After dinner, I’d watch her drop slices into the sink, the water queuing up like impatient little saints. Sometimes she pressed one against her cheek, as if listening for its heartbeat. The drawers would creak open and shut, trapping air pockets of salt and apricot.
She used to say, “eat something real before it rots onto your skin and you start sweating jam.” But I’d just push my tongue into the bruised corners of the bowl, where the fruit bled out its last blush.
Once, she left the kitchen and didn’t come back. Not that night◆ About the ending
❧ About the title