Bunny

In her school mailbox, along with an ad for a play about how the town is the Body, Samantha receives a cutesy invitation to the Bunnies’ Smut Salon. Samantha thinks it’s a mistake. She assumes the Bunnies hate her and thinks about how this semester will be like the last one: Just her and the four Bunnies in the writing workshop, with the Bunnies fawning over one another and laughing inexplicably. Last semester, Samantha came late to the workshop and then started ditching it.

Back in the present, Jonah and Samantha talk about how they didn’t write much during the summer. Jonah is the most talented poet in the program. He is recovering from an addiction, and like Samantha, he didn’t attend a ritzy undergraduate program. They both receive stipends. He wears a T-shirt with a kitten on it. Samantha recalls a conversation they had at one of the first MFA parties, where Jonah said he felt like he was in a dream and someone should punch him to wake him.

The Lion, smelling like the green tea he makes in his office, says hello to Samantha, and she’s instantly uncomfortable. She wonders what happened between them.

Ava works at a nature lab where she organizes dead bugs. She dropped out of an elite art school next to Warren. She hates Warren but likes to retrieve things from the dumpsters behind the undergraduate dorms and disrupt student tours. She tells the students’ moms that people on campus have no problem chopping off heads with an ax.

Ava and Samantha meet on a bench near the pond. Due to Jonah, Samantha is late. Ava sneaks up behind Samantha and scares her. She says that she thought the bonobos—her name for the Bunnies—kidnapped her. She also thinks Jonah wants to have sex with Samantha and that Samantha should set the Lion’s office on fire.

To mark the last day before school starts, Ava and Samantha go to the monster diner, where Ava draws and Samantha pretends to write. They then go to the zoo and a squalid place for Vietnamese iced coffee. Samantha thinks she once almost got shot at the coffee place—Ava thinks she’s exaggerating.

At Ava’s house, they drink sangria and then go to the roof and tango together. They take turns being Diego—a dreamy man they made up. The invitation to the Smut Salon distracts Samantha, and she imagines the Bunnies are upset by her absence. Samantha tells Ava about the invitation, and Ava doesn’t think Samantha should go. She compares the Bunnies to Twinkies and reminds Samantha that she refers to them as “Cuntscapades.” Samantha says they’re her peers and thinks about how Ava, with her punk style, is the opposite of the Bunnies. Ava gives in and says Samantha should go. Samantha repeats that she doesn’t want to go, but she’s afraid things will get worse for her if she doesn’t show.

Samantha stands in front of Cupcake’s house. A block from the school, her neighborhood features elegant homes and smells like fall leaves—Samantha’s neighborhood smells vulgar. Cupcake’s neighborhood is still dangerous.

Samantha remembers how she and Ava watched a family of raccoons appear through her drain pipe. They encouraged a tiny raccoon to be brave and bold. She senses the four Bunnies watching her from an upstairs window. She gets a text from an unknown number: an emoji with a monkey covering its eyes.

Samantha stares into Cupcake’s eyes. She looks, smells, and dresses like a cupcake, and Samantha wants to eat her. She wears pearls to the workshop and writes “postfeminist dialogues” featuring herself and kitchen appliances.

Cupcake (Caroline) takes Samantha into her living room, where Creepy Doll (Kira), Vignette (Victoria), and the Duchess (Eleanor) are gathered. Samantha imagined that the Bunnies might be engaging in some kind of artsy, demure, sexual activity, but they sit around a candlelit coffee table and warmly welcome her.

Creepy Doll says the Bunnies thought Samantha might have gotten lost. Creepy Doll has curly red hair, and her voice sounds like a child in a scary movie. She writes fairy tales about wolf princes and demon girls, and the Bunnies treat her like their pet. Creepy Doll is the one Bunny who sometimes tries to socialize with Samantha.

Vignette has a punk look and is candid. Her eyes say “fuck you,” and her stories center on Disney princesses in bloody orgies and beastly women chewing on Barbie doll parts. At one point, Samantha thought she and Vignette could be friends, but then Vignette became a Bunny.

The Duchess is like a gaudy moon goddess. She writes puzzling prose on panes of glass with a sharp diamond that she keeps around her neck. She calls her writing “proems.”

Cupcake offers to take Samantha’s coat, but Samantha isn’t wearing one, and the Bunnies start laughing. Cupcake notices Samantha’s height, and the Bunnies offer her a cocktail they made just for her. Samantha says she likes it, but the Duchess thinks she’s lying. The Smut Salon forbids lies.

On the coffee table, there are books by Lord Byron, John Keats, Marquis de Sade, Roland Barthes, Emily Brontë, Ovid, and the Lion. Samantha assumes the Bunnies think she had sex with the Lion. She imagines confronting them, but she doesn’t.

The Bunnies tell Samantha the point of the Smut Salon is to inspire creativity and explore different desires. Cupcake reads a sexual poem by Michael Ondaatje. The poem features the image of a cinnamon peeler, and Cupcake peels a cinnamon stick. The Bunnies praise Cupcake’s performance, and then Creepy Doll, in a red cloak, reads a sexualized adaption of “Little Red Riding Hood.” Vignette reads from Marguerite Duras’s novel The Lover (1984), and the Duchess reads a passage from French theorist Julia Kristeva about the elements of the erotic.

After each performance, the Bunnies sigh, and Samantha sighs with them. She thinks about how Ava couldn’t fit in with the clique, and she has a cantankerous conversation with Ava in her head about them. Sometimes, she says things out loud and confuses the Bunnies.

They tell her it’s her turn to perform, and after stalling, she tells them about Rob Valencia, a boy from high school. She was his wife in a school play; they get murdered, so she died with him repeatedly. Vignette wonders if they had sex, and Samantha says dying with him was like sex but more passionate.

The truth is, Samantha and Rob had much in common—they both read Dante’s Inferno by candlelight—but Rob didn’t like her. He loved Alyssa Fisher, and he took her to the prom. To make the story salacious, Samantha lies and tells the Bunnies that after the last performance, Rob took her to a woodlot behind the school, and they had voracious sex.

Samantha wakes up on her mattress wearing the same clothes as last night. She remembers the smells and sounds from the Smut Salon and describes her gloomy, rundown apartment. When Ava saw it, she convinced her to stay at her house.

Samantha remembers more about last night: The Bunnies pressured her to go outside and get them a bunny—bunnies are everywhere on campus. Samantha thought they were kidding, but the Bunnies don’t joke about bunnies. The Duchess let her off the hook, but Samantha went to find a rabbit anyway. Outside, she heard rustling noises, imagined a blade slicing her neck, and talked to her mom in heaven. Her mom spoke in Ava’s voice, and Samantha saw Ava’s face.

At her apartment, a bunny sits on her windowsill before jumping away. She receives texts with emojis from the Bunnies and goes to find Ava.

Not used to walking to school from her apartment, Samantha gets lost. She can’t find Ava and notes the town’s everyday violence—stabbings, shootings, beheadings, and sexual assault. She addresses the reader and tells them she’s not exaggerating. It’s a precarious place—a monster’s den. As she enters Warren’s campus, people go from looking like zombies to looking like the stars of a French movie.

Workshop happens in a place called the Cave. There’s a stage in the center of the room and no windows, conspicuous doors, or clocks. Samantha compares it to a womb. The teacher is the experimental novelist Ursula. The Bunnies call her KareKare, but Samantha calls her Fosco—the villain from Wilkie Collins’s Gothic novel The Woman in White.

The Bunnies—the only other students—sit on the stage in a circle that Fosco calls the “Hermeneutic Circle” or “Safe Space.” Fosco welcomes Samantha to the first day of class and says they were worried. Samantha says she got lost. Creepy Doll says she gets lost too.

Fosco brings her small dog to class and seems to speed-read their work in the Cave. She reminds the five students that this is their last semester with a workshop, and Samantha reminds herself that Warren is an advantageous place to be—though she wrote way more before Warren, and Ava thinks the school is harming her soul.

Vignette shares her writing first: episodes about a nihilistic woman, Z, who throws up soup and has anal sex in a trailer. The Duchess tells Vignette she likes how Vignette deals with the Body, and Samantha notes how people at Warren are obsessed with the concept of the Body. Samantha shares her writing, which has a plot, and the Bunnies, typically outright critical, give her some backhanded compliments.

Samantha looks for Ava at the diner, the nature lab, and the anarchist bookstore—she’s not there. She goes to the bench by the pond. Ava isn’t there either, and Samantha notes the quiet and the presence of a swan.

She starts to see lots of bunnies; they surround her when she comes to the bench. One day, Jonah approaches her and asks if she is talking to the bunnies. He invites her for a drink, but Samantha declines and rushes away.

On campus, the Bunnies greet her and smile. Cupcake offers her a cupcake. During the workshop, the Duchess touches her wrists. No one talks about Smut Salon.

With Ava not around, Samantha stays in her morose apartment. She eats generic chili and drinks old wine from a mug featuring the Falls of Falling. Samantha is from Falling and tells the readers they probably visited the famous waterfall. If the reader went to Falling during Halloween, they might have gone to the haunted house where a man in a hockey mask chases visitors—the man was Ava’s dad.

In her apartment, she hears the opera singer above her and keeps her curtains closed in case the flasher is on her fire escape. She tries to write but can’t. She thinks about how much she wrote as a child in the hair salon where her mom worked. She imagined what her mom and the customers discussed—they confessed they were lizard people, they admitted they talked to aliens, or they revealed they had a squirrel for a lover. Samantha’s fantastical stories worried her teacher, and they informed her mom, who pretended not to care.

Samantha writes to escape into another world. At Warren, she can’t write, and she discusses her inability with the Lion—he’s her thesis advisor. He tells her not to panic and focus on something else.

Samantha’s mom died when she was 13, and she lived with her dad, who got rich from murky real estate endeavors. For a few years, Samantha had access to an opulent lifestyle. A memory of Ava propels Samantha to text her. She doesn’t reply, but the Bunnies text her: They’re throwing a party tonight.

Samantha doesn’t go to the party but to tango class. She dances with a Warren engineering student before she spots Ava. Samantha wants to cuss her out, but she doesn’t. Ava asks about the Smut Salon, and Samantha tells Ava how much she misses her. She thinks Ava is upset with her for hanging out with the Bunnies, but Ava acts like she doesn’t care. She jokes she almost died because Samantha deserted her for the Bunnies. She puts her hands around her face and tells her, again, that she doesn’t care what she does. Crying, Samantha runs away.

The Bunnies answer the door in pastel dresses. The party’s theme is Prom Night, and Cupcake wants to braid Samantha’s hair. Cupcake wears a Peter Pan collar from a website, All She Wants to Do Is Dance. Creepy Doll picks out a dress for Samantha, and Samantha recalls a scene from the teen horror movie Carrie.

The Bunnies compel Samantha to tell her about her prom. She went with her best friend, Alice. A goth teen, she and Samantha skipped school and read horror novels at the library. For prom, Alice wore a skull-and-roses ball gown, and Samantha wore a halter dress with a fire-breathing dragon. Creepy Doll brings up Rob Valencia and tells her Rob probably wanted to go to prom with her but was intimidated—Samantha even frightens the Bunnies.

Quotes from last year enter Samantha’s head—the Bunnies told her they liked her bag or earrings (even if she was not wearing earrings). In the present, Cupcake painfully braids Samantha’s hair, and Creepy Doll wonders if Rob is dead due to Samantha.

In the living room, four attractive young men—Hugo, Beowulf, Blake, and Lars—dance with the Bunnies as Kate Bush sings in the background. They wear blue suits and speak pompously: Beowulf compares Samantha’s beauty to the complex sentences of the French novelist Marcel Proust.

The Bunnies leave, and while the boys talk to her, Samantha can hear screams. The lights flicker, and the Bunnies return. Cupcake looks like she’s been masturbating, and Creepy Doll claims the screams were hers.

There’s a knock on the door, and the Bunnies encourage Samantha to see who it is. It’s Rob. He’s in town for business—he’s a prosperous businessman. The pair sit on a loveseat. Samantha feels like a 25-year-old woman with a 17-year-old heart. Although Rob isn’t conventionally handsome, he has charisma, and he’s over six feet tall—one of the few men who can make Samantha feel short. Rob dismisses Alyssa and confesses that dying with her during the play was the most erotic period in his life. Rob finds Samantha’s height alluring. He says she scared everyone at high school, but they knew she was sad and lonesome.

While dancing with Rob, Samantha notices the other boys dancing with the Bunnies and chewing on their clothes and accessories. Rob chews on Samantha’s wrist. He won’t stop, so she slaps him. Rob calls her abrasive and launches into an insulting monologue covering her supposed faults. As Bryan Ferry plays in the background, his head explodes.

Samantha wakes up in a strange bed and thinks about Goldilocks masturbating in front of the three bears. A woman sits on the bed and calls her Bunny. Samantha thinks the woman is Ava, but it’s Kira/Creepy Doll. Samantha remembers the gore from Rob’s head blowing up and whimpers. Kira gives her pills and tells her she only thinks she saw Rob’s head explode.

The living room shows no traces of an exploded human head. Though it’s daytime and sunny, Kira and Samantha take SafeRide to school. Samantha admits she hasn’t done the reading, and Kira says no one does the reading—Kira only did the reading out of boredom. Samantha worries that Fosco/Ursula/KareKare will call on her.

In the Cave, the Bunnies call Samantha “Bunny,” and as with Kira, she calls the other three Bunnies by their real names: Caroline, Victoria, and Eleanor. The Bunnies praise Samantha’s story (she wrote it a long time ago) and compare her to Jorge Luis Borges and Virginia Woolf. Samantha praises Caroline’s story (a girl has an affair with a mist). Fosco asks Samantha about the reading, but Eleanor answers for her.

At a cafe that serves everything mini—mini sodas, mini cocktails, mini cupcakes, mini chicken and waffles, etc.—Samantha confesses she can’t feel her hair due to Cupcake’s elaborate knots.

The Bunnies try to trick Samantha into believing that she didn’t see Rob’s head explode last night, but Kira/Creepy Doll subverts them by saying that his head blew up. The Bunnies switch to praising Samantha’s writing. Through a project, they want to help her start writing again. The project is about the Body; it’s experimental, intertextual, and performative—a hybrid. The Bunnies use feminist rhetoric to pressure Samantha to join the project. She thinks about calling the cops or fleeing to Mexico, but she agrees to participate in their workshop.

In Kira’s attic, everyone wears a rabbit mask. There’s a fire extinguisher in one corner and an ax in another. The Bunnies tell Samantha not to panic, and they give her pills to calm her.

Kira complains about always holding workshop at her place, and Caroline talks about how, last time, he came out naked—not naked but oozing. Samantha has no clue who the “he” is or what they’re discussing. Victoria says she likes it when they appear naked. Samantha wonders who “they” are.

As an Edith Piaf song plays, the Bunnies circle a bunny, and one of the Bunnies asks what kind of boy they want to make today. Another Bunny says “boy” is binary, another Bunny says they’re supposed to call them “Drafts,” and another unnamed Bunny says she’s “borny.”

The Bunnies chat, the light goes out, and the wind arrives. The curtains are on fire, and the bunny explodes. Blood and fleshy bits cover Samantha as someone knocks on the door. Caroline says Kira should get it, but Kira got it last time, so Caroline gets it. She brings in a handsome man, Odysseus. He likes the Italian filmmaker Federico Fellini and the French critic Roland Barthes. French is his first language. He won’t stop screaming, so Victoria—Kira refuses—grabs an ax and leads him to the bathroom. The bunny boy runs out of the bathroom with an ax in his shoulder. Kira gets another ax and finishes him off.

The Bunnies discuss/workshop the bunny boy/Draft. They want more complexity, cockiness, and a functioning penis. They ask for Samantha’s input. She says she loves scarves. After three Drafts, Odysseus IV arrives, and the Bunnies (Samantha included) are smitten.