RABBITS

The bells on Vera’s braids go bing bong. Like a tin seesaw, hollowed on the inside, creaking through the Ozark heat, the shrill chime ricochets in the parlor. The children, holding rabbit toys, dance in jolly circles, threading between each other. Her jaw flaps, hinges, and snaps; Mr. Victor’s falsetto squeezes past his tight lips and into her mouth. 

The ventriloquist gave her his voice. He gave her pearly eyes, locked in silk sockets, he gave her braids of foals’ hair, he gave her a girl-shaped space in his bed.

When the mothers beckon their children for supper, when Mr. Victor draws the drapes and closes off the Southern sun, he takes his dummy dancing. In the drawing room, Run Rabbit Run spins on the record. Two bodies, wrapped in a promenade position, waltz across mahogany floors; their shadows stretch over linen curtains. With his hand up her throat, she tells him: “I’m having the swellest time.” 

The dining room marked dread before reckoning, like prepping the pigs before slaughter. They sat on the ends of an oblong table, centered with a lithe candelabra. 

Her face moistens from the venison roast beneath. It’s undercooked, and from its cracks, a watery blood spreads through the china plate, bloodying the millefleur. 

“Why aren’t you eating?” says Mr. Victor every evening. 

She does not answer, for her throat is free of his arm. 

But dinner never satisfied Mr. Victor. Seizing her porcelain ankle, dragging her up the Corinthian stairs, spreading her in the girl-shaped gap, he makes love to her — he stuffs her. In spite of the rank dew, in spite of the bedchamber’s mustard walls, in spite of the moans he forces through her, Vera looks to the mural on the ceiling. She looks to the rabbits, who race through barley and daffodils. She imagines them dancing to her shaking bells.