fiction
A while ago, a friend of a friend told me a story. She is a baby-sitter-slash-English-teacher for this young kid, and he always wants her to read him this story called "The Stone Rabbit," and she's not really sure why. I thought it was sort of an unlikely children's story, and for some reason that made me want to rewrite it.
So here's that. This is a few months old. I don't remember why I didn't post it at the time.
The Stone Rabbit
Because the monster was so terribly ugly, he lived alone in a cave. It may be because he was so terribly ugly that he was even called a monster. No one ever looked at him long enough to be able to tell what he was. However, it is hard to imagine anything but a monster having been so ugly, and so it was widely assumed that he was in fact a monster. In any case, it may be that there is no difference between being monstrously ugly and being a monster.
No one ever explained this popularly espoused, if largely subliminal, theory to the monster, but he wasn't blind. He saw his reflection, and he knew that to call his face "unattractive" would be like referring to the Irish Potato Famine as "that time McDonald's stopped serving French fries." His was an authoritative and enlightening repugnance-all living things were aesthetes in his presence: humans and animals fled from him, the humans struggling to pant the word Monster! through the trembles and constrictions of abject fear, the the animals braying, squeaking, or gasping in a manner that transcended species; plants, those loyal companions to all who fear the the perception and cognition of others, browned and shriveled when he came near, leaving the area around his cave a desolate landscape of dirt, mud puddles, and sparse, rotting vegetation.
In fairness, the monster could never object to the treatment he received. He had a certain amount of familiarity with Aristotle. One of his great ambitions, aside from someday having a friend, was to read the seminal works of Western philosophy. Given his freedom from social commitments, the reader might assume that this project presented no great difficulty, and in fact the monster set about it with spectacular gusto. In fact, his new enthusiasm for academics led him to espouse an obscure theory of "(de/re)constructing paradigmatic temporalities," which he understood to mean he ought to read in alphabetical rather than chronological order. He completed the As without incident, but at approximately the time he came to Barthes he found that certain pages would burst into flame when his gaze fell upon them. He told himself that the problem lay in cheap recycled paper and shoddy binding; however, his ego never known society's soothing caress, he lacked the ability of knowing self-deception that allows so many of us to overcome our daily vicissitudes. He never got round to starting up again on his project. Nevertheless, he had got through Aristotle, and Aristotle resonated with him. He correctly identified the phrase "[the primacy of sight among the senses*]" as one that was both pertinent to his life and sanctified by millennia of citation, and he copied it in his most careful and florid handwriting along with his other favorite "moments" from the As onto a large unlined sheet of paper taped to the wall near his bed.
A chameleon, Victorian furniture, a child's attempt at oil painting, egg salad. Ugliness is not a universally intolerable feature. In certain objects it may even be desirable. In any case, humans have a great tolerance for ugliness. Zoogoers can admire a chameleon in a glass tank, Victorian furniture may be reclined in, parents coo over the art of their offspring, and heaping bowls of egg salad adorn a great number of picnic tables and Christmas dinners. And this is to say nothing of plants and animals. The demand that one's face will be pleasant to look upon could have, and perhaps should have, seemed willful and capricious to the monster. But he never failed to understand that his ugliness, superficial to his own consciousness, was a thing that burrowed into the selves of others, catalyzing toxic reactions at a chemical level. The chemicals of our selves, he understood, were to be guarded with utmost care. Death itself was preferable to subjecting them to the caustic processes the monster represented. That much he had gleaned from his own reflection and from the As.
Shunned by society, monsters find ways to allay boredom, often, it seems, by carrying off children, livestock, or virgins. If our monster was not bad-natured enough for such behavior, not was he immune to the toxic effects of loneliness. As the reader can imagine, he needed a friend.
From the outset, the monster knew that a human friend was out of the question, contact with civilization being an impossibility. It once occurred to him to keep a pet, and he obtained a hamster. For one such as a monster, the advantages of a hamster are obvious: hamsters sense largely by smell and live in cages. But the hamster, employing the mysterious instincts for which animals are so envied, managed to construct a crude rope out of fiber from its sawdust litter, and one morning the monster awoke to find it dangling from the bars on top of the cage. There was no note.
And so the monster turned, as do so many in his position, to stone carving. "If I can't make a friend," he thought, "well then I'll make one." What he meant, of course, was that he would construct companions for himself rather than finding them.
Night and day he labored. His initial handicap was two-fold: for one, he had never carved stone before; for two, only rarely had he been privileged with a glimpse of the front side of a living creature, since they tended to bolt in terror as soon as they saw him.
He solved these problems with diligence and imagination, respectively. After a time, the dismal landscape around the monster's cave came to be populated with a small but growing society of inventively fronted statues, both human and animal in shape. The monster had no "end point" in mind for his little group-in a hidden, treasured place within his mind was the hope of reconstructing all the people, the sparrows, worms, cows, dear, fish, and other animals that had once inhabited this place. Pragmatically, he knew this would be impossible, but he sometimes allowed himself the fantasy, and when he did it he felt a fluttering joy, as if his imitations of white moths had come to life and were searching ticklingly for yellow wildflowers inside his chest.
But after a point, his work slowed. He wanted to enjoy the fruits of his labor rather than carving away day in and day out. There was a particular female whose company he especially enjoyed. She was not beautiful by any stretch of the imagination, but not quite so ugly as he, and he was flattered by her lack of projectile vomiting. Their conversations were one-sided, but that didn't bother the monster. The two of them would stand arm in arm enjoying each other's company-he discussing Thomas Aquinas or Agrippa the Skeptic, she listening attentively. The monster enjoyed the society of all his creations, but it was she who charmed him in sleep and made his dreams anxious for morning.
Fearing she'd be lonely while he was away, he carved her a pet rabbit, to whom he confessed his feelings for her. There were days he saw nothing in her but stoney indifference; other times it seemed as clear as day that she loved him, and he knew that the next time he saw he would take her into his arms, but when the time came his face flushed bright red and he found himself paralyzed by some nervousness from some unknown source. The rabbit was a good confidant. He offered a sort of immobile sympathy, and never breathed a word to anyone.
In the end, it was she who made the first move. One day, he sweatily held her hand and wondered aloud whether Augustus of Hippo more properly belonged to the medieval or to the classical period, he thought felt a tiny squeeze. Daring to imagine that she would come to life had made him feel ready to sob hard enough to tear himself apart, although he had only let out one heavy, quavering sigh and pushed the thought from his mind as quickly as he could. Now, as he brought his wart-crusted lips to hers, he sensed the barest, most enticing trace of warmth radiating from her. As they touched, she crumbled to dust.
The other statues collapsed as well. As the monster turned to them for consolation, his immense ugliness leveled them one by one, and at an accelerating pace, so that within a month the devastation was complete. He buried the pieces of each as it fell, digging graves as they were first dug, as an escape from the unbearable madness of the spectacle of death, as a denial of having lost.
The stone rabbit alone was not affected. It stood odd-faced and good-naturedly through everything, and when the monster had finished the last burial he collapsed next to it, exhausted and heartbroken, and fell asleep. That night dreamt of being nuzzled by a warm rabbit with brown fur and a constantly twitching nose. When he woke up, he found himself shivering with cold and wet with dew. His arm was draped over the rabbit. It was as cold as the dirt.
In the many years that followed, the monster never carved another living thing. The rabbit was enough. He spent every day with it, stroking it behind the ears and contemplating the As. He sang to the rabbit in his ugly voice, drew ugly pictures for it in the dirt, and told it jokes that no one would have thought was funny. He slept by the rabbit every night during the summer. During the winter when the barren dirt froze solid, he would come out of his cave early in the morning to break the ice off the rabbit and pour hot water over it. Then one day the monster didn't come out of his cave, and he didn't come out the next day, and many hundreds of days passed, and on none of them did the monster come out of his cave, and in his absence first moss, and then grass began to grow, and the yellow flowers and the white moths came back, and there were fish in the stream and the trees grew back their leaves.
On one of the endless number of days on which the monster did not leave his cave, a young man and a young woman walked in the woods, side-by-side with warm laced fingers and steps that were small and zigzagging with ungainly desire. They came to a small meadow with many small hills, abundant in yellow flowers and white moths that they mistook for butterflies. They wandered around the meadow and touched each other's chestnut hair, then fell down on a hill and kissed each other's tingling lips and chests with nothing above them but the sky and the endless universe, and when the young woman worried about grass itch, the young man smiled and lay down his jacket for her, and removed a condom from his wallet.
Later, the young man got up to stand for a few moments behind a tree. When he returned, he found that his lover had slipped back into her white blouse and was bent over to see something on the ground. He approached from behind her and wrapped his hands around her waist in remembrance of act of love they had lately carried out. Then he saw what she was looking at. "I wonder who made it?" said the young woman. "It's pretty," said the young man, letting his hands slip from around her waist.
__________________
*There is a single word for this idea, which no amount of googling has been able to uncover. It appears somewhere in James Joyce's Ulysses, but I haven't got a copy with me.
So here's that. This is a few months old. I don't remember why I didn't post it at the time.
The Stone Rabbit
Because the monster was so terribly ugly, he lived alone in a cave. It may be because he was so terribly ugly that he was even called a monster. No one ever looked at him long enough to be able to tell what he was. However, it is hard to imagine anything but a monster having been so ugly, and so it was widely assumed that he was in fact a monster. In any case, it may be that there is no difference between being monstrously ugly and being a monster.
No one ever explained this popularly espoused, if largely subliminal, theory to the monster, but he wasn't blind. He saw his reflection, and he knew that to call his face "unattractive" would be like referring to the Irish Potato Famine as "that time McDonald's stopped serving French fries." His was an authoritative and enlightening repugnance-all living things were aesthetes in his presence: humans and animals fled from him, the humans struggling to pant the word Monster! through the trembles and constrictions of abject fear, the the animals braying, squeaking, or gasping in a manner that transcended species; plants, those loyal companions to all who fear the the perception and cognition of others, browned and shriveled when he came near, leaving the area around his cave a desolate landscape of dirt, mud puddles, and sparse, rotting vegetation.
In fairness, the monster could never object to the treatment he received. He had a certain amount of familiarity with Aristotle. One of his great ambitions, aside from someday having a friend, was to read the seminal works of Western philosophy. Given his freedom from social commitments, the reader might assume that this project presented no great difficulty, and in fact the monster set about it with spectacular gusto. In fact, his new enthusiasm for academics led him to espouse an obscure theory of "(de/re)constructing paradigmatic temporalities," which he understood to mean he ought to read in alphabetical rather than chronological order. He completed the As without incident, but at approximately the time he came to Barthes he found that certain pages would burst into flame when his gaze fell upon them. He told himself that the problem lay in cheap recycled paper and shoddy binding; however, his ego never known society's soothing caress, he lacked the ability of knowing self-deception that allows so many of us to overcome our daily vicissitudes. He never got round to starting up again on his project. Nevertheless, he had got through Aristotle, and Aristotle resonated with him. He correctly identified the phrase "[the primacy of sight among the senses*]" as one that was both pertinent to his life and sanctified by millennia of citation, and he copied it in his most careful and florid handwriting along with his other favorite "moments" from the As onto a large unlined sheet of paper taped to the wall near his bed.
A chameleon, Victorian furniture, a child's attempt at oil painting, egg salad. Ugliness is not a universally intolerable feature. In certain objects it may even be desirable. In any case, humans have a great tolerance for ugliness. Zoogoers can admire a chameleon in a glass tank, Victorian furniture may be reclined in, parents coo over the art of their offspring, and heaping bowls of egg salad adorn a great number of picnic tables and Christmas dinners. And this is to say nothing of plants and animals. The demand that one's face will be pleasant to look upon could have, and perhaps should have, seemed willful and capricious to the monster. But he never failed to understand that his ugliness, superficial to his own consciousness, was a thing that burrowed into the selves of others, catalyzing toxic reactions at a chemical level. The chemicals of our selves, he understood, were to be guarded with utmost care. Death itself was preferable to subjecting them to the caustic processes the monster represented. That much he had gleaned from his own reflection and from the As.
Shunned by society, monsters find ways to allay boredom, often, it seems, by carrying off children, livestock, or virgins. If our monster was not bad-natured enough for such behavior, not was he immune to the toxic effects of loneliness. As the reader can imagine, he needed a friend.
From the outset, the monster knew that a human friend was out of the question, contact with civilization being an impossibility. It once occurred to him to keep a pet, and he obtained a hamster. For one such as a monster, the advantages of a hamster are obvious: hamsters sense largely by smell and live in cages. But the hamster, employing the mysterious instincts for which animals are so envied, managed to construct a crude rope out of fiber from its sawdust litter, and one morning the monster awoke to find it dangling from the bars on top of the cage. There was no note.
And so the monster turned, as do so many in his position, to stone carving. "If I can't make a friend," he thought, "well then I'll make one." What he meant, of course, was that he would construct companions for himself rather than finding them.
Night and day he labored. His initial handicap was two-fold: for one, he had never carved stone before; for two, only rarely had he been privileged with a glimpse of the front side of a living creature, since they tended to bolt in terror as soon as they saw him.
He solved these problems with diligence and imagination, respectively. After a time, the dismal landscape around the monster's cave came to be populated with a small but growing society of inventively fronted statues, both human and animal in shape. The monster had no "end point" in mind for his little group-in a hidden, treasured place within his mind was the hope of reconstructing all the people, the sparrows, worms, cows, dear, fish, and other animals that had once inhabited this place. Pragmatically, he knew this would be impossible, but he sometimes allowed himself the fantasy, and when he did it he felt a fluttering joy, as if his imitations of white moths had come to life and were searching ticklingly for yellow wildflowers inside his chest.
But after a point, his work slowed. He wanted to enjoy the fruits of his labor rather than carving away day in and day out. There was a particular female whose company he especially enjoyed. She was not beautiful by any stretch of the imagination, but not quite so ugly as he, and he was flattered by her lack of projectile vomiting. Their conversations were one-sided, but that didn't bother the monster. The two of them would stand arm in arm enjoying each other's company-he discussing Thomas Aquinas or Agrippa the Skeptic, she listening attentively. The monster enjoyed the society of all his creations, but it was she who charmed him in sleep and made his dreams anxious for morning.
Fearing she'd be lonely while he was away, he carved her a pet rabbit, to whom he confessed his feelings for her. There were days he saw nothing in her but stoney indifference; other times it seemed as clear as day that she loved him, and he knew that the next time he saw he would take her into his arms, but when the time came his face flushed bright red and he found himself paralyzed by some nervousness from some unknown source. The rabbit was a good confidant. He offered a sort of immobile sympathy, and never breathed a word to anyone.
In the end, it was she who made the first move. One day, he sweatily held her hand and wondered aloud whether Augustus of Hippo more properly belonged to the medieval or to the classical period, he thought felt a tiny squeeze. Daring to imagine that she would come to life had made him feel ready to sob hard enough to tear himself apart, although he had only let out one heavy, quavering sigh and pushed the thought from his mind as quickly as he could. Now, as he brought his wart-crusted lips to hers, he sensed the barest, most enticing trace of warmth radiating from her. As they touched, she crumbled to dust.
The other statues collapsed as well. As the monster turned to them for consolation, his immense ugliness leveled them one by one, and at an accelerating pace, so that within a month the devastation was complete. He buried the pieces of each as it fell, digging graves as they were first dug, as an escape from the unbearable madness of the spectacle of death, as a denial of having lost.
The stone rabbit alone was not affected. It stood odd-faced and good-naturedly through everything, and when the monster had finished the last burial he collapsed next to it, exhausted and heartbroken, and fell asleep. That night dreamt of being nuzzled by a warm rabbit with brown fur and a constantly twitching nose. When he woke up, he found himself shivering with cold and wet with dew. His arm was draped over the rabbit. It was as cold as the dirt.
In the many years that followed, the monster never carved another living thing. The rabbit was enough. He spent every day with it, stroking it behind the ears and contemplating the As. He sang to the rabbit in his ugly voice, drew ugly pictures for it in the dirt, and told it jokes that no one would have thought was funny. He slept by the rabbit every night during the summer. During the winter when the barren dirt froze solid, he would come out of his cave early in the morning to break the ice off the rabbit and pour hot water over it. Then one day the monster didn't come out of his cave, and he didn't come out the next day, and many hundreds of days passed, and on none of them did the monster come out of his cave, and in his absence first moss, and then grass began to grow, and the yellow flowers and the white moths came back, and there were fish in the stream and the trees grew back their leaves.
On one of the endless number of days on which the monster did not leave his cave, a young man and a young woman walked in the woods, side-by-side with warm laced fingers and steps that were small and zigzagging with ungainly desire. They came to a small meadow with many small hills, abundant in yellow flowers and white moths that they mistook for butterflies. They wandered around the meadow and touched each other's chestnut hair, then fell down on a hill and kissed each other's tingling lips and chests with nothing above them but the sky and the endless universe, and when the young woman worried about grass itch, the young man smiled and lay down his jacket for her, and removed a condom from his wallet.
Later, the young man got up to stand for a few moments behind a tree. When he returned, he found that his lover had slipped back into her white blouse and was bent over to see something on the ground. He approached from behind her and wrapped his hands around her waist in remembrance of act of love they had lately carried out. Then he saw what she was looking at. "I wonder who made it?" said the young woman. "It's pretty," said the young man, letting his hands slip from around her waist.
__________________
*There is a single word for this idea, which no amount of googling has been able to uncover. It appears somewhere in James Joyce's Ulysses, but I haven't got a copy with me.