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Harvesting Bunnies

He was that type of boy: the kind who skinned live squirrels and bunnies and other small creatures in his backyard when he was a child. His parents (Bless their souls! said the neighbors) sent him to intensive therapy at a ranch for troubled kids in Utah and now he was perfectly normal and sane though you could still feel, by some strange force, the thought of bringing a pocket knife to fur gnawing in the back of his mind. I never thought he was going to kill me, and to be fair, he never even tried. But he enjoyed going to gun conventions a little too much, drove the pickup a little too fast, choked me a little too long during sex. Even when I was wheezing for him to stop he wouldn’t let go, and when he took his whiskey down (straight, highball glass) he took it just a little too quickly. It was a little life we had together, and there wasn’t much at stake if I left him, but if I’m being completely honest I was slightly scared to do so. Although I never would know how one of those bunnies would feel as he snatched it in a ruddy fist and pressed the blade into its skin, at the same time I didn’t really want to know. So I stayed. I made jam in our kitchen. I bought a handgun and hid it under the kitchen sink, just in case. I stopped pleading when I couldn’t breathe. 

(Like any good wife, I starched his white button-down shirts with spray that smelled like new linen and a waterfall. This was habitual, on Wednesdays. First: wash out the deodorant and sweat in warm, soapy water. Second: dry in the sunlight when the humidity hasn’t saturated the summer air just yet. Finally: spray, iron, don’t burn yourself with the hot metal, and fold to tuck it into the closet we shared.) 

I broke my leg that July (hanging up his white button-down shirts on the clothesline when the stepladder collapsed under me and I fell five feet to the earth, hitting the grass with enough weight to snap my right fibula and femur, said the doctor at Piedmont Athens Hospital) and when I told him that I wasn’t going to be able to cook or wash or walk the dog (Harvey, a rottweiler) for two months, I thought I saw that flicker of light reflecting off a knife’s edge in his eyes again. This wasn’t what a good wife did. But he smiled a large smile that made me want to snarl at him, Bastard! Why are you smiling at a time like this? He said that we’d have to hire someone to help us out. A maid, maybe, or a caretaker. I said that we didn’t have that kind of money from his job at the poultry plant. We had no kind of savings to pay someone to take care of me for two months. He kissed my forehead with his chapped lips and smiled again and told me to trust him. 

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He was that type of man: a swaggering Wednesday regular at the Roadhouse on Lumpkin Street. A Newport flickering at his lips and hair buzzed close to his scalp, he wanted whiskey, straight, highball glass. I was bartending and we talked, small talk—nothing much worth noting now, but when he asked if I was seeing anyone else, and I said no while making a gin and tonic for another man, You really shouldn’t ask that, really he left his phone number on the receipt with a generous tip and, really, I had to admire that persistence. When friends asked how we met, I told them this story until those friends got married and melted away into the background or moved to Atlanta and, before long, he was all that I had left. 

(He joked to these friends that I was the meekest bartender in Athens, Georgia. He said the women at the other bars were brash, bold, took no shit, fought back. I didn’t. I didn’t have much to fight back. I was polite and agreeable, and I poured the drinks tall and potent and that’s what made him love me.)

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After breaking my leg, I couldn’t walk up the stairs to the bedroom so I slept on the couch that backed into the kitchen, Harvey snoring at my feet. He slept alone in our bedroom. I knew he didn’t like this, and he grumbled that I should just suck it up on the crutches. I told him that I would have, but I needed to be close to the kitchen in the morning so I could make his breakfast and lunch to take to the plant. There were only so many things I could do. There were only so many battles I could fight. He shook his head. The next day, Mary arrived. 

I never knew where he got the money to pay her. She was short, plump, and freckled with copper hair pulled back into a tightly wound bun and a smile I hated because it never felt like she actually cared that I was stranded on the Goodwill couch in the living room with a husband who could snap my neck if he so wanted to. She wore scrubs with the caretaker agency embroidered on the chest pocket. A different color every day (usually cool colors like navy blue or dark green, but there was one particularly infuriating set that was the same dull, placid pink as a dog’s tongue). 

I told her that I could cook his breakfasts and box his lunches. Make my jam. I could struggle up to the kitchen counter on the crutches and lean over the butcher’s block next to the sink and, really, she didn’t have to do that much. She smiled with a mouth the color of dried apricots and told me that I wasn’t going to heal in two months if I didn’t just rest. She climbed the ladder to hang up his white button-downs. She cooked his breakfast and boxed his lunches before he went to the poultry plant and served him dinner when he came home. She made his bed, our bed. A good wife, I thought. Then what am I to him?

(Unfuckable. Unlovable. Worthless. A bunny.)

This is what I get for trying to do everything right, to try to please him, to try to stay alive and not end up his next prey. I get a broken leg and a red-headed slut, not even the drink, a real one (to make a red-headed slut: combine Jägermeister and peach schnapps. Add cranberry juice to fill to the top. Stir as necessary. Serve on the rocks). It wasn’t hard to realize that Mary was a complete and total slut, and as it usually is, it wasn’t hard to realize that nothing was completely right after she arrived. He spoke to her more than he did to me, the two laughing in the kitchen while she made meatloaf or in the bathroom upstairs while she cleaned the tub, while I rotted into the couch just within earshot through the thin, whitewashed walls. She asked him, How was work? When he got home, he said, Hello, Mary before saying hello to me. 

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You don’t like her, he grumbled one night once Mary had gone home in her rusted, puttering sedan after dosing my painkillers into my palm with a glass of lukewarm water from the tap. She thinks you aren’t cooperating. And I wanted to tell him, you love her more than you ever will me (the truth) and, would you kill Mary? You would kill me, and I’m afraid of that (also the truth) but the painkillers (oxycodone) made me woozy so I just told him, I’m miserable because my leg hurts. And he said, But you aren’t miserable to me, and I wanted to tell him, it’s because you’ll kill me if I’m not (the truth) and, you speak to her more than you do to me anyways (also the truth) but I, weakly, said that it was because he was my husband. He said that if I was really his wife, I’d crutch up the stairs so I could sleep with him at night.

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I became familiar with the details of the living room, like the size of the checks on the red gingham couch from Goodwill (two by two inches), how many pleats were in the white curtains (it depended how the wind from the open windows blew them), the corners of the TV stand Harvey had gnawed down as a teething puppy, the deepness of the wrinkles in the leather recliner (like that of the forehead of an old, balding man). I should have been familiar because I made this little life we had together, scrubbed the stains on the couch, hemmed the curtains with my mother’s sewing machine, hit Harvey with a rolled-up newspaper when he chewed on the furniture so he whimpered and put his tail between his legs. Now, I knew how it felt to be that helpless, whimpering, cowering dog. 

(He’d had a dog, as a child. A pitbull, brutish and sharp-toothed, that he trained to sniff out rabbit dens and birds nests. He gave it treats when it sniffed out the baby animals, when he stuck his hand down the hole of the rabbit den to clasp his ruddy fingers around tufts of fur, floppy ears, eyes not yet open. Or, when he climbed a tree to a robin’s nest, the eggs round and blue like small moons, and picked them up one by one to throw and splatter embryos on the forest floor. The dog licked up the broken eggshells.)

It wasn’t hard to realize that nothing was right. Like how, three weeks into my bedrest, I began to suspect that he was fucking Mary. Not in the house—no, he was never that stupid. In fact, the two of them really went out of their respective ways to fuck outside the house. Some nights, after she’d washed all the dishes and left, he mumbled that he was going for a drive in the pickup or forgot his wallet at the plant. I told him he could get his wallet when he went to work in the morning, but all he did was slam the screen door and leave me all alone with the yellow glow of a single lamp to light the room. One day when he had off from work, near the end of July, she went to hang his white button-downs on the clothesline and I heard him at the back door speaking to her, low and growling, and then after the door closed, silence. I didn’t want to imagine them fucking in the backyard, him choking her a little too long while the grass rubbed sore spots on her back open, their lips (his: chapped, hers: the color of dry apricots) eating each other alive. I grabbed a crutch lying on the floor, pulled myself off the creaking couch (I was sore from lying down), and hobbled to the kitchen; I found the gun in a small cardboard box under the sink, behind the sponges and extra towels, just where I had hidden it, and slipped it into my bra before fumbling back over to the couch in the full-leg cast. When he stumbled back into the house, he was raking his fingers through his hair to tame it. 

He sat down with me one night after Mary had left, smiling again. A Thursday. He said that I needed a change of scenery. That I must be so dull and bored, rotting into the couch, taking painkillers twice a day and staring at the drapery. So, he had taken a long weekend away from the poultry plant, and we were going to go to the beach. Just to get out of the house for a bit. 

But I can’t walk. He said that I could sit on the beach, or on the motel balcony overlooking the ocean. 

But how are we getting there? He’d already packed the rusting fold-out beach chairs in the bed of the pickup. 

But what about Mary?

His face fell. Just a bit: the corners of his eyes crumpled and his grin loosened into a slack-jawed, open-mouth frown. The redness in his skin drained. I thought he might say something (what, I couldn’t guess for sure, maybe a confession or admittance or denial). But he composed himself, his smile returning as he shook his head. She wouldn’t come with us. She’d have a long weekend too. 

(I couldn’t say that I didn’t want to go. I pictured the trip to the beach as part of a sadistic, horrible plan for him to win back my good graces, to cover up the affair, to make our little life together something again. A plan so we could sleep in the same bed again.)

It was August; the sad, stormy month bringing summer to an end. We left the next morning and drove the exhausting hours from Athens to Savannah. I didn’t speak; the gun rested cold against the strap of my bra, digging into my skin, under an extra-large cotton tee from a Baptist church fair that drowned out the shape of my frame. 

But I wanted to be sure, really, before I was the one to do anything stupid. As he drove the pickup a little too fast down the highway, just enough to evade the consideration of getting pulled over by a cop, I asked him: Are you fucking Mary?

Silence. Like the back door closing. 

What? 

You heard what I said.

Silence. Like the robin’s eggs hurtling through thin air until they hit the ground and cracked. He flipped the pickup’s turn signal and pulled to the side of the road, slamming on the brakes, jolting hard. 

He said that he had told her not to come back after they’d fucked in the backyard, that I was getting better and would be cooking and making jam and hanging up his white button-downs soon enough. She had been the one to offer herself when he was frustrated, and he didn’t know that I knew, and he was sorry. He said that I was so sad in a pathetic way, and he couldn’t stand to see me on the couch any longer. I was a good wife, he said. He was sorry. 

I said, Let’s go to the beach. 

He pulled back onto the highway, the pickup’s engine rearing and transmission lurching. The gears shifted as he pressed harder and harder on the gas pedal, and we were silent, together. 

He was that type of man: a predator, preying on the good graces of a good wife so his shirts were starched and moonshine jars had jam in them instead of alcohol, preying on the other women he could fuck until they couldn’t breathe, preying on squirrels and bunnies and other small creatures as a child. He harvested these things for all that they were worth before leaving them to rot. But his rot and my rot were all the same imminent decay that sunk us deeper and deeper into the teeming earth, to hell. I’d dreamed of doing this since the day he walked into the Roadhouse on Lumpkin Street, since I poured his whiskey tall and potent. There wasn’t going to be another woman to stop him. It had to be me. I’d make sure he wouldn’t harvest another bunny, smash another egg, marry another woman, fuck another woman, ever again. I married him in the Athens courthouse, wearing a secondhand lace dress that was once white but someone had put it through the laundry with red cloth, staining the lace barely baby pink. There were no witnesses. And so began our little life. 

I was the good wife, the one who starched his white button-downs and made my jam, the one who took domesticity as a compliment. I broke my leg, and he rewarded me with Mary. So I shot him, left him lying face down in the beachside motel bed, the cream sheets stained deep and warm and rusty. I didn’t check out. I put the Do Not Disturb hanger on the door so the maids wouldn’t clean it and crutched out of the motel with the pickup keys in hand. Two days before checkout, before someone found the body, his body, Monday I would go to the doctor and my  cast would come off  to reveal my thinned, shriveled thigh and pale, weakened calf. But the bones would be healed. 

(Like any good wife, I carve marrow from bone, tendon from flesh, stem from seed when I make my jam. Jam jars lean heavy, stacked in the cabinets, while the fruit is macerated to be softened, ripened, boiled. He took me to the farmer’s market once and told me to buy jam there instead of making such a mess. Once, I shattered a glass jam jar and let the juice from an over-ripe strawberry stain the kitchen sink, let the blood from the glass shards in my hands drip-drip down the gurgling drain.) 

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Audrey Lee is the author of the poetry collections Disjecta Membra (Bottlecap Press, 2022) and Probably, Angels (Maverick Duck Press, 2020). She holds a B.A. in creative writing and American studies from Franklin & Marshall College. She is the winner of the 2020 Jerome Irving Bank Short Story Prize, a former resident at Sundress Academy for the Arts, received a 2020 Best of the Net nomination from Drunk Monkeys, and her writing has been recognized by Columbia College of Chicago, the University of Virginia, Ithaca College, and the University of Iowa. Her work has been featured in or is forthcoming from Wax Nine, Okay Donkey, DIALOGIST, and Teen Vogue. She lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. You can find her online at audreymorganlee.com, on Instagram @eternallyonline, or on Twitter @postpunkpoet

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