I worked at this gigantic department store in 2016. Keene was the place to shop for many surrounding rural towns, but we were by no means in a big city, so I never did get how we kept up such a massive building. We never came close to filling its shelves, though it seemed I did nothing else but stalk them.
But this day I was the one being stocked, stocked by a bunny, a bunny rabbit after
my right finger. Wherever I worked, filling this shelf, mopping that floor,
lounging in the lounge, I would turn aside one moment and there he was, with
his mouth over my finger. Why are you doing that? Apart from his unexplainable
behavior, he looked natural, no real expression on his face. Why are you so
persistent? I didn’t want to find out, so whenever he appeared, I would quickly
remove my finger and go somewhere else, before he might start biting.
Halfway through my shift, I was filling a shelf with plastic plant pots or something, turned to move the cart, looked back, and Ahh-! How did you get there? I was getting tired of this, so out of curiosity, I let him stay a moment to see what would happen. He didn’t bite down, but I could feel his teeth just touching my finger. Small sparks flickered, strange lights glittered, until just behind him to his right, an amorphous portal began to emerge from the air, of psychedelic spirals, glowing, but dark, sometimes purple, or green, or orange.
As the day
went on, I started leaving him on my finger longer each time he appeared, because it was interesting to watch,
plus I didn’t want to start scraping up my finger by yanking it out too quick.
But as this portal started to look like a portal, you know, an entrance, I would get nervous of what
else might happen, what might come through, so I would still remove my finger.
As
interesting as it was the first few times, I soon decided I didn’t want to
see that bunny one more time. But I was tired and nervous. I didn’t feel like
carrying on the rest of this shift so vigilant of my hands. I went to the
employee lounge, hoping he couldn’t find me there, and hoping there was little
enough work that I wouldn’t be missed. I sat in a chair at a desk, kicked my
feet back, closed my eyes and went to sleep.
~
In my sleep there was a dark matrix where a long chain of vibrant blue faces floated, pleasant faces, with smiling
red lips, having conversations. Each was its own organism, but also took the
place of an atom to a molecule. Then they started to look like more complex
single molecules, rather than simple chains. Then there were many
of them bound together with some other molecules red. As they grew with more
kinds and colors, they began to look like creatures I recognized.
I
heard a narrator. Oh, I see. It’s like an
educational video. Molecular biology is awesome. I expected him to give a
lesson about that, about some extraterrestrial life forms, or some new kind of
organism being developed by extraterrestrials, but instead he was giving
life-advice or something. I must have been inattentive to the first things he
said, because I didn’t know what he meant, as the animals started to appear. ‘Don’t
let it be a this.’ I was shown a long
list of animals, one after the other, sliding in front of my view from left to
right. ‘Don’t let it be a that.’ And
then it switched, switching more quickly as it went on, and I was admonished
not to let it be any one of them.
Each animal was a bit bigger, a bit more advanced than the last. As the animals grew and grew into a macro scale, they started to look less diverse, dozens and dozens of variations of
nearly the same thing. They were like crosses between fish and weasels, long
and slender with slick dark fur. “Don’t
let it be a zif. Don’t let it be a ziffle. Don’t let it be a zahnz. Don’t let
it be a zallix. Don’t let it be a sorpf. Don’t let it be a soof. Don’t let it
be a skallenz. Don’t let it be a sirf. Don’t let it be a zoorow. Don’t let it
be a bunny.”
The
sequence stopped. It be a bunny. There, it was the bunny, floating in the dark
matrix. Then the matrix faded away, but the bunny remained, sitting on the desk.
And there I was back in the employee lounge, with my finger in the bunny’s
mouth.
!
Ahh-! It’s that dang bunny rabbit with his dang mouth over my dayng finger! Let me tell you, I could not get away from this bunny!
