Violent Shades of Sunshine

Chapter 1: There are these bunnies ...

There are these bunny rabbits that follow me around …

They are more like doodles than real bunny rabbits – wiry bundles of lines that some kid could have scribbled onto the air with Crayons.

They talk all the time.

Say things like:

"You’re a fucking head case."

"Loser."

"We hate you."

 Fucking bunnies ...

Chapter 2: STFU

I tried drinking to make them STFU.

Pounded half a fifth of Jack Daniels. Got drunk, wrecked my car. Puked. Passed out … I think – I don’t remember, really.

One of the bunnies woke me up.

“Fred,” he said. “You suck.”

And they chased me through my hangover.

Fucking bunnies.

Chapter 3: Doctor Marcy and the Dog I Never Owned

I thought maybe I was crazy. I went to a shrink. Stretched myself out on her sofa.

Dr. Marcy. She had her legs crossed tight as scissors. These real nice legs knifing out of a pencil skirt. Her hair was pulled back in a bun.

“Tell me what’s troubling you,” she said and she watched me with her clinical eyes.

Eyes cold as scalpels. Every glance slashing a piece of me away. Blink blink blink cut cut cut, she hacked into me. I felt like a frog in a seventh-grade science class.

I started to tell her about the bunnies, then one of them said, “Mention us and we’ll make you jump off a building.” I believed that they would. So instead of mentioning the bunnies, I told Dr. Marcy that I’ve been missing my dog lately. This dog that I had as a kid. I never had a dog when I was a kid, but I had to think of something, and that was the first thing that came out of my mouth: “I miss the dog I had as a kid.”

“What happened to it?” Dr. Marcy asked.

Now I’m spending an hour a week delving into the psychological ramifications of losing a dog that I never even owned.

Chapter 4: Mrs. Derby

I named the dog that I never owned Derby.

Derby was the first name that popped into my head.

Mrs. Derby was the name of my first grade teacher. I had a crush on her, though I was too young to realize it at the time. I only knew that looking at her gave me a hot feeling in my gut.

I’d watch her clicking from her desk to the chalkboard, sweater stretched across her chest, heels wobbling ever so slightly, and my eyes would glaze over. My throat would tighten. I’d feel the warmth in my gut squirming down into my thighs and up into my chest. I’d taste my heartbeat on my breath.

Mrs. Derby would stretch up to write times tables on the chalkboard and her skirt would stretch across the curves of her ass … heat down to my toes, heat to the tips of my fingers. Heat to the roots of my hair.

She’d turn to say something and ocean waves would swell through my ears. My heart would slam dunk through my neck as I watched her lips form hearts on the air. The earth would stop. The room would spin, anchored by the gravity of her eyes.

At night I’d lay in bed picturing what our home together would look like. Probably a nice place with big sofas and lots of windows. A living room full of light and floral patters. A bedroom with a king-sized bed. Soft mattress, fluffy pillows, a thick comforter. Everything would smell like rose-scented detergent. And it would be pink, because Mrs. Derby liked pink.

I’d imagine Mrs. Derby sliding into bed in pink silk pajamas and that warm feeling in my gut would spread until my palms were sweating and my forehead felt warm and my blood boiled down to steam.

I’d spend hours trying to think up clever things I could say if I happened to talk to her the next day.

I never really thought of anything, though.

Chapter 5: Just Kill Yourself Now

Tabitha is sitting in bed next to me. She’s gluing cow faces onto the heads of Victoria’s Secret models.

“I’m bored,” she says. She’s wearing a tank top and an old pair of my whitey tighties, which I find sexy.

She isn’t in the mood – she already told me. But I keep trying.

“I could dress up as Edward Cullen and drink your blood.”

“Vampires are so vanilla.”

“You love it when I dress up as Edward Cullen.”

“I used to love it when you dressed up as Edward Cullen. Now I’m bored with it.”

She pinches her tongue between her lips and squints in concentration as she glues a cow face onto the head of a model that is wearing this sexy black thing called a merry widow.

Speaking of merry widows: “I read this story the other day about a woman who accidentally shot her husband playing some sex game called the Dirty Cowboy,” I say.

Tabitha perks up.

“What’s the Dirty Cowboy?”

“I don’t know.”

“Oh. Too bad.”

And she goes back to sorting through her pile of cow heads, looking for one just the right size and shape for this brunette who is turned away from the camera, covering her bare chest with her arms but letting her bare butt cheeks bubble out around her thong.

Tabitha is really good at pasting cow faces onto the heads of Victoria’s Secret models.

She’ll go through old issues of Farm Journal and Southern Livestock Standard and cut the cow heads out with an X-ACTO knife so there aren’t any sharp corners or rough edges. Then she sorts them into piles according to size and breed.

She’ll spend ten minutes sorting through her piles, looking for a cow head that is the right size and angle, so that when she pastes it on, you’d really think there is this sexy woman with a Hereford face peering out from beneath that splendid blonde aurora.

She’ll go back later and write things like Moo in a word bubble next to it.  

Here is what one of her cow head models looks like:

To see another one, see my Twitter feed. 

“You could play naughty librarian,” I say.

“You don’t really want me to play naughty librarian.”

“No, I don’t really.”

“You’re just throwing out anything kinky that comes to mind.”

“No, I’m not.”

She glances up from her pasting. Arches an eyebrow at me.

“What? I’m not …

“I’m not!

…

“Okay, yeah, I am.”

Tabitha scratches an itch on her thigh and goes back to pasting.

“Let’s just kill ourselves so we don’t have to bother thinking of things to talk about,” she says.

“Loser,” a bunny says.

Chapter 6: Bunnies and Cigars

 

I named the bunnies.

Humper, Thumper, Jumper, Dumper, Craphole Joe and St. Peter Cottontail.

They sit at the kitchen table while I sleep, kick their feet up. Play cards. Smoke cigars.

They know when I’m awake.

They say, “Hey Fred.”

“Welcome back to the world, Fred.”

“You suck.”

My nose will be stuffed full of cigar smoke — stale blue fumes that hang over my face like a pillow. Trying to suffocate me.

I don’t know how those damned bunnies manage to smoke their cigars; I don’t know how they manage to hold cans of spray paint or tubs of gasoline, either. They aren’t real bunnies. I mean, really. They change colors!

Today, for instance, they look like someone took a red marker and scribbled their faces on the air. Sometimes they are purple, though, or blue or black.

Yet no matter their color, they are always bastards.

“I hate you,” says Dumper. 

Sometimes I can get away from the bunnies. If I duck around a corner fast enough, I can usually shake them for a little while.

I used to do that when I was younger, but they’d always find me again.

“Where the fuck you been?” one of them would ask, and there would be paint on their fur or they’d smell like gasoline. That night on the news, I’d see some story about how vandals were out spray painting cars or starting fires in the Quik Mart around the corner.

I learned not to leave them alone.

Bad things happen when I leave the bunnies alone.