Rabbit Stew

Michelle Tang Jackson

Wendy turned the oblong package over in her hands. She could feel the cold pushing through the wrapper and it smelled like wet paper bags. There was a date, September 2000, scrawled in her father’s hand. She opened the freezer door and pushed the lump back into its alcove, nestled amongst a den of icy mounds. Wendy felt a gag blossom right below her ribs and she braced herself over the sink.

Wendy studied art at a bitty liberal arts college in the Bay Area. Her chucks were always Jackson Pollocked with paint and her charcoaled hands often bore a likeness to a coalminer’s. And of course she was poor and did cheap wedding photography on the weekend and posed as a life model for cash and cigarettes and canvases. Of course, she thought when she would take her clothes off for a lover or a roomful of artists; it’s all a part of it. And she would imagine chewing on paintbrushes and dipping her toes in the palette and dancing across a road made of stretched canvases.

Wendy was very different than her father Harold, a man who doused himself in female moose piss and sat freezing beneath bushes for sport. A man whose puffy orange vest competed with the mid-morning sun burning reflections onto the marsh’s wet mirrors. A man who shot at squirrels and scrub jays and other nibbling critters from the back porch, talking to his little lady on the phone.

“How’s school, missy?” he asked right after the bang that startled both a rabbit sniffing at his vegetable garden and his daughter on the end of the line.

“Fine,” Wendy said gritting her teeth, then “Do you have to shoot while we’re on the phone, dad?” She dipped her brush into a pot thick with cerulean. “I’m supposed to do a mixed-media piece next week and all I’ve done is go through my recyclables and paint them.” Wendy could hear her father’s echoing holler over the speakerphone,
“Is that what you’re paying to go to school for?”

“Yes Dad—it’s all part of the process.” She swirled her brush. “How’s the shop?”
“Oh, you know—more fellows come in for bullshitting than for the bait. But nothing for you to worry about. How you doing with money, little lady?”

“Getting by— you know I always wanted to be a starving artist.” Another bang.

“Well, come by the house on Sunday. Jake and I’ve got a present for you.”

Wendy received her father’s act of kindness in the form of dozens of dead rabbits, each wrapped, frozen, and dated, then packed into a giant ice chest. She hauled the cooler into the kitchen and filled the freezer. She took a remaining rabbit and set it on the countertop to thaw.

The itch between your teeth when a body craves meat—the bang, the grapple, then the stillness, her father had said in way that made her own molars tingle. Wendy unwrapped the bundle. It was a hulking buck, its maps of sinew tightly wound down the body that seemed to be made entirely of muscle. The rabbit looked like a strung member, a picture she had seen in reproductive health wherein a penis was drawn without its skin to reveal the hard Cremaster muscle, the Tunica dartos, the Pampiniform plexus. One couldn’t have called that a bunny— the telltale ears, fluff, and tail had been clipped or ripped away. Wendy knew her father had spent all weekend picking off these rabbits so his starving artist would be able to eat something besides ramen. Wendy knew he had gathered the lifeless gray and brown carcasses, swung them slightly by the ears as he hung them by their large feet upon hard strung wire. Jake the yellow lab would’ve sniffed at the pile of bloodied fur and skins, waiting, the itch between his teeth. Then her father with his shears would snip away the ears from the skinned carcasses. Coolly, as if he were cutting the unblossomed lilies from a flower arrangement. The pile of ears—pink soft slits wrapped in tufted brown—gave way to row upon row of these sleek shafts of blood and tendon, glinting in the autumn light. Of course, Wendy thought.
Wendy put her hand around the thick rabbit then lifted the lid from a boiling pot. She threw the body into bubbling water and washed her hands. She unpacked the freezer, unwrapped each rabbit and laid it out in its brown paper wrapper. Wet pink paint on brown palettes. Her canvas rolled out before her, sprawling spaces that beckoned her. When she had filled the small kitchen counter, she moved to the kitchen table, then the living room, the fireplace mantle. She filled the bathtub, the bathroom sink became flesh and paper. She brushstroked the coffee table and the ottoman, and the place where the curtains pool to the floor. She ceremoniously anointed the staircases and stoops and doorways above her. And when she was done, she wiped her sticky hands across her thighs and saw rabbits, everywhere, naked and pink as if they had multiplied and ruptured and now laid still.