I WATCHED REMARKABLY BRIGHT CREATURES!!!! it was so goooddddd. i’ve been working on this OC piece inspired by it since. IF YOU HAVEN’T WATCHED IT, YOU NEED TO!!!
colette elaine and the lesser rabbit
cole acquired me from a box with no lid.
i had been lying there for some time beneath a yellow dog, a bald doll, and a wooden snake with wheels. the snake had no business being among us. it was smug, as wheeled things often are.
cole put both hands on the edge of the box and looked in.
children are usually greedy when choosing. they grab. they squeal. they make promises to bears they will later abandon in minivans.
she had a narrow little face then. dark hair in her eyes. one shoelace undone. a scab on her knee she had been told not to pick and had picked anyway, privately, with great commitment.
her mother stood behind her holding a paper cup of coffee.
as though one can be hurried through a matter of destiny.
cole reached past the dog, past the doll, past the appalling snake, and took hold of my foot.
a poor method. still, i admired her conviction.
i had one ear bent sideways and a stain across my stomach shaped vaguely like ohio. my fur had surrendered long ago. i smelled of cardboard, dust, and the faint, historic breath of other children.
her mother said, “honey, look at him.”
i looked back with, hopefully, the one eye still properly attached.
a fine answer. incomplete, but fine.
cole tucked me under her arm.
the mother sighed in the manner of women who have decided patience is something they are doing at you.
at home, i was placed on the kitchen table.
a table is where meat goes, and though i may resemble the lesser of my kind, i am stuffed with cotton and should be treated accordingly.
cole’s grandmother leaned close enough for me to count the tiny cracks in her lipstick.
“lord, that thing’s pitiful.”
cole’s hand came down on my back.
cole had said three words. adults are often exhausted by very small amounts of child.
her mother said, “we’ll wash it first.”
now this was plainly untrue.
a spoon is just a spoon. a sock is often just a sock, though i have known exceptions. i had survived basements, church sales, the damp breath of attics, and at least one dog with spiritual problems. to call me just a toy showed a poverty of attention.
cole seemed to know this.
she took me off the table before anyone could drown me in a sink. i had heard once that it only takes two inches of water, and what a humiliating way to go that would be.
her room had a narrow bed, a plastic lamp, and no useful hiding places. a child with no useful hiding places becomes inventive. cole shut the door and sat with her back against it, breathing hard through her nose.
i had been owned by criers, droolers, biters, singers, and one boy who buried me for an afternoon in a flower bed. cole did none of these things.
she held me in her lap and studied my ruined ear.
“they’re mean,” she whispered.
i had heard the adults. they had used gentle voices. they had said honey. they had spoken of soap, cleanliness, improvement. nobody had thrown me. nobody had broken a dish. nobody had done anything simple enough to hate.
cole rubbed her thumb over the ohio stain.
“they’re mean in the quiet way.”
there are children who know volume before they know multiplication. cole was one of those. poor thing. clever thing. someone should have stopped it sooner.
after that, i understood that adults could pet a child and pinch her in the same motion.
“she’s an old soul,” said an aunt, later, at a table crowded with casseroles.
i lay in cole’s lap beneath the tablecloth, listening to knees and shoes and the wet push of forks through pasta salad.
old soul. dreadful phrase. adults use it when a child has learned to be convenient in an eerie manner.
cole kicked one heel against the chair leg.
“she notices everything,” the aunt said.
“too much,” her grandmother agreed.
above us, the women laughed. lightly. fondly. as though they had set a plate in front of her and she had refused dessert.
i wished, briefly and with great force, for teeth.
cole took me everywhere after that, though never in a way that invited discussion. i traveled under coats, in backpacks, behind couch cushions, once inside the hood of a sweatshirt she wore backward for twenty-three minutes before an adult told her she looked ridiculous.
“turn it around,” her mother said.
then, in her room, she turned it backward again.
a modest victory. i respected it.
school was where she lost most often.
i did not attend, being a rabbit of domestic habits, but she brought the place home on her clothes. pencil shavings. cafeteria milk. mulch. the sharp smell of copy paper. some days she came back with a sticker on her shirt and took it off before anyone saw. some days she came back with her mouth pressed so tight it nearly vanished.
“did you have fun?” her mother would ask.
cole would stand in the kitchen with her backpack still on.
a useless answer to a useless question.
fun had very little to do with anything. cole came home tired in the bones. she came home with names she had not been called directly but had understood anyway. weird. quiet. bossy. boyish. stuck-up. names children place around another child like little fences.
at night she told me the accurate version.
i considered this. maggie sounded rather sensitive.
“i wasn’t staring. i was looking at her barrette because it had a bug on it.”
wise. people rarely thank the one who points out the insect.
“they said i couldn’t play because they already had enough people.”
she dug a fingernail into my seam.
“there were three of them.”
i knew very little of games. i knew enough to distrust arithmetic used cruelly.
her elders noticed only the outer facts. no calls from the school. no bruises. no tears in public. no tantrums in the cereal aisle. a tidy child, mostly. bright. peculiar, but bright. a child who read above grade level and said please without being reminded.
they missed the rest with astonishing discipline.
cole began keeping things in strange places. bottle caps in a sock. pebbles in a pencil box. a dead beetle in a folded tissue, which i found excessive. scraps of ribbon. the foil from chocolate. a plastic ring from a cupcake that said happy birthday in purple letters, though it had belonged to no birthday of hers.
she did not call these treasures. cole had too much sense.
i understood. naming a thing too warmly invites someone to take it.
one afternoon her grandmother found the beetle.
full names are the sirens of adults.
cole came to the doorway.
her grandmother held the tissue pinched open. “why on earth would you keep this?”
cole looked at the beetle. then at the woman. then at the beetle again.
“that doesn’t make it better.”
“it makes it less his fault.”
her grandmother did the mouth thing. thin, thinner, nearly gone.
“you always have an answer.”
cole looked at the floor.
of course she had an answer. they kept speaking to her. another mystery the adults failed to solve.
they asked why, then disliked the arrival of because. they asked what happened, then preferred the version where she didn’t tell the truth. i began to suspect the larger humans were not, as advertised, the clever ones.
that evening cole did not eat much dinner.
“don’t be dramatic,” her mother said.
drama, i learned, meant any feeling an adult did not wish to host.
later, in her room, cole placed me on her pillow and lay beside me with her hands folded over her stomach.
“i think i’m bad at being a kid,” she said.
i had known several children. most were sticky tyrants with poor balance. cole was perfectly within the range of the species.
she turned her face toward me.
“or maybe everybody else is weird.”
at last, a sensible theory.
by ten, cole had developed a laugh she used for adults.
a small laugh. breathy. quick to appear, quicker to vanish. she deployed it when an uncle teased her about having no boyfriend, though she was ten and had no interest in boys except as loud obstacles. she deployed it when a neighbor asked why she looked so serious. she deployed it when someone told her she was too pretty to frown.
afterward she would find me.
i agreed each time, though my face lacked range.
her room changed as she grew. the plastic lamp disappeared. a bookshelf arrived, cheap and leaning. the dolls she had been given sat untouched in a corner, their hair glossy, their expressions vacant with privilege. i did not trust them. dolls are too interested in being looked at.
cole preferred books with cracked spines and covers that smelled like closets. she liked things that had already survived somebody else.
she read with me tucked under her elbow, turning pages too fast. sometimes she read aloud, especially when a sentence pleased her. she gave the good sentences a private little hum. poor sentences received a snort. i admired her standards. by then, cole had become severe in her tastes. not unkind. severe. there is a difference, though adults rarely notice any difference that does not serve them.
her teachers liked her until she spoke.
“cole is very bright,” one said at a conference.
i sat in her backpack under the chair, pressed beside a half-eaten granola bar and a pencil with bite marks.
“but she can be challenging.”
her mother made the tired sound.
an accusation, apparently.
“not disrespectfully,” the teacher added.
cole’s shoe nudged the backpack. once. twice.
“sometimes,” the teacher said, “she seems almost older than the other kids.”
there it was again. old. older. grown. mature. the words gathered around her like adults trying to make a child tall enough to blame.
cole said nothing on the ride home.
her mother said, “you have to learn when to let things go.”
i lay in her lap. the car smelled of french fries they had bought because the conference ran late. cole had eaten three and then stopped.
“you’re smart enough to know what she means.”
cole’s fingers tightened around my foot.
smart enough. dreadful phrase. they used it like a little shovel, digging childhood out of her one scoop at a time.
that night, cole took a marker from her desk and wrote on the underside of my bent ear.
i could not see it. naturally, this concerned me.
many years passed before i learned what she had written.
crude lettering. uneven. the e nearly escaped.
i had never had a name before. mine, i thought, was a dignified improvement.
