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INTRUDER
Sean Ruane is a shuffle-footed basket of slurs. He lives in Baltimore with his wife and two children. He has a masters degree in experimental psychology and is working on masters degrees in computer science and creative writing at Johns Hopkins University. He has been published or has work forthcoming (mostly forthcoming) in many magazines, including Word Riot, Theives Jargon (as E.F.Arnau), Monkeybicycle, Eyeshot, and others.
Bound by red stitches to the haunches of wiggling rabbits; the rabbits, wrapped in gauze, crocheted to my palms by an intruder.
This must have happened during the night.
I was foolish to have fallen asleep with my front door open and my rabbits in plain sight. This only tempts intruders.
This is why my cats are closeted.
The rabbits don't appear to be in any pain.
I look into their eyes and they reflect back a small image of me, my own eyes reflecting smaller rabbits still, a bottomless cascade of confusion.
Whoever did this did a very good job.
I can scarcely see where my hands end and the rabbits begin.
The intruder obviously used a front-post double crochet with a drawback triple-bobble. Indeed, a rare stitch for sweaters and an even rarer stitch for grafting rabbits to human hands.
So finely stitched, were it not for the note, mottled with bloody thumbprints, I'd think I grew these bunnies in my sleep.
The note said: Perhaps this is just what I needed; to be bound by red yarn to the brotherhood of the rabbit.
I clap and my rabbits bark in pain.
It is funny how the rabbits tolerate, with equanimity, their flesh being stitched to mine, yet bristle with pink-eyed indignation at being clapped together like chalk erasers.
These rabbits are inconsistent.
The rabbits lift me up using raw shoulder strength and thigh power. They clap me against my bedroom wall.
It seems they are trying to teach me a lesson. Perhaps not underestimating rabbits is that lesson.
By these salty bunnies I'm paddled against my walls, my screams bouncing around like stale abattoir echoes.
I ask them to stop; they answer by twitching their noses and dropping dark pellets down my pajama sleeves.
These are arrogant rabbits, too. I begin to wonder if it is not me who has been stitched to them rather than versa vice.
Imagine the hare-lipped consternation of two rabbit lovers awakening to find the door to their man-cage ajar and their prognathous, furrow-browed man bound to their fluffy backs.
I notice that there are now three more rabbits bound to my forearms, dewy with afterbirth; it is clear that my hand-rabbits are still going at it, adapting to their circumstances. They hump like the indigent, blithely unaware of anything other than the tug and pull of their own desires.
These new, glabrous rabbits blink at me with puffy little eyes. I consider poking them out with my thumbs but it isn't their fault.
This is my intruder's fault.
Soon I am covered with generations of rabbits.
I have rabbits on my back; rabbits stitched to my tummy, nestled in my tummy fur; two rabbits sewn to my thighs, curious about my genitals. The rabbits, I realize, are stitching
themselves to me, knitting with sweatshop ferocity.
The rabbits are writing more threatening notes, leaving mottled thumbprints everywhere. Who taught these bunnies how to sew and write notes?
I wonder where they got the severed thumb.
It could be that these rabbits are trying to frame my intruder.
The rabbits tell me that the intruder taught them.
I tell them that they are all blazing liars.
They hold a mirror up to my backside and show me a tattoo of the intruder teaching my rabbits how to crochet and to forge notes. Bearing the toolmarks of my crafting shears, the intruder presents them a thumb. He stands among the rabbits, a disaffected hitchhiker, squinting like a prophet from my buttocks and peering into the future, my present.
My living rabbit suit itches and I writhe and twist and laugh like hell at the audacity of this intruder.
Then I roll around on the floor, smothering their post-coital grins, listening to the arid pops of arrogant bunnies.
Their small bursts tickle my cheeks and ears like champagne bubbles.
I decide to lie in wait for the intruder, eager to surprise him.
I will leap from my man-cage, festooned in bursted bunny, and tell him that my tattoo is incomplete.
And I will ask him if he wouldn't mind crocheting my thumb back onto its stump.
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