The Bunnyman by Melinda Scully
“The Bunnyman will worse than kill you,” they told Luther. “He wants your insides on your outside, maybe to eat them, but mostly because it’s fun to play with your wiggly squiggly guts and let them jiggly jiggle down from a tree branch like ribbons. Then he’ll hang your skin from your front porch. By the time anyone finds you, the blood drips all out and you’ll be an empty piñata. Just a sheet-white ghost, swaying in the air.”
Kids those days were twisted little fucks.
“Not your kids, not your problem,” Mrs. Thomas told her husband.
It was Mr. Thomas’s problem, though, because those kids were properly rotting his son’s brain. They spun these tales about the Bunnyman, murderous guardian of the backwoods, and Luther lost whatever nerve he had left after the big move to Virginia. When the sun went down, he snuck out of bed to sit by the slats in the kitchen window, peering into the woods until sunrise with little bloodshot eyes. “I can’t,” he whispered when his parents begged him to sleep. “I feel like my stomach is full of worms.”
Goddamn playground shits. So much for Southern hospitality. “I’ll strangle them,” Mr. Thomas said. “Turn ‘em into bunny chum.”
“Stop it, you will not. Teach him to cope,” Mrs. Thomas said.
She was right, of course. If it wasn’t the Bunnyman, it’d be something else. Life was like that—nothing but a series of escalating ordeals that taught you how to be a man. If Mr. Thomas was honest, he wasn’t mad at those twisted kids. However, he was deeply upset by the prospect of taking Luther to a shrink to explain the bedwetting, and the nervous puking, and then shelling out hundreds of dollars just to be told that his son was off in the head. No shit, doc.
Mr. Thomas sat Luther down and gripped the boy’s shoulders. “Listen to me. The Bunnyman isn’t real.”
Luther shivered like his guts really were full of chilly little squirmy worms.
“Those kids are just messing with you,” Mr. Thomas said. “It’s fun to haze the new kid. Jesus, you’re fine! Stop crying.”
Luther cried.
So, Mr. Thomas hatched a hands-on plan. He drove into town and bought one hundred mouse traps, a wooden baseball bat, fishing line, a bag of tiny bells, and a pocket knife. As the sun set, he and Luther rigged mouse traps and laid them out in the front yard. Then they wove the fishing line between the maples on the outskirts of the yard, looping little bells along the way. “Noisy booby traps for your boogeyman,” Mr. Thomas explained.
“Pick one: pocket knife or baseball bat?” Luther chose the knife. “Now we wait in our patio chairs all night. We aren’t afraid of anything, right? Because we’re men. Now say the rhyme,” he told Luther.
Luther chewed on his knuckles and shook his head.
“Fine, then write it down so I can.” After many tears and hiccups, Luther conceded and wrote the summons down. Mr. Thomas cleared his throat and recited to the lawn, the gravel road, and the forest beyond.
“Run, run, run, as fast as you can,
He’ll still catch you,
the Bunnyman,
the Bunnyman,
the Bunnyman!”
The breeze jangled the windchimes. Luther sat perfectly motionless, like even the squirmy wormies in his tummy had frozen solid.
“See? Nothing,” Mr. Thomas said. “You look braver already. Now, let’s relax.”
Relax, relax, for the love of god, relax, Luther. Setting his baseball bat on the ground, Mr. Thomas crossed his arms and settled back into his chair.
Relax.
Sleep a wink, Luther.
Certain that Luther would soon follow suit, Mr. Thomas slept.
Until the bells rang at midnight.
Mr. Thomas flinched awake, expecting to see his son doing god knows what at the edge of the lawn. He wasn’t. Luther hadn’t moved a bone.
The bells—
At the edge of the lawn, on the gravel road, there he was. Shaking a severed fishing line so the bells jingle jangled.
The Bunnyman.
Frosty fur over his whole body, with hands the size of a man’s head. Hands, or were they paws? A mask—maybe a hood? —with ears. Those weren’t normal bunny ears. Those ears stood straight up, pointed and twitching towards the patio. Gaping black holes for eyes. Like someone had ripped the eyeballs right out of their sockets.
“It’s just a kid in a costume—Get out of here, you little shit!” Mr. Thomas yelled.
It was a costume, it was a costume, except, look at those mattes. The fur was chewed up, and packed down, and stained with darkness, darkness splattered across the chest.
Blood—blood. The dark spots were blood. Branches and sticks stuck out at odd angles, not tangled up in fur, but stuck deep inside the Bunnyman, like the forest was growing out of him.
Mr. Thomas blinked, and then the Bunnyman fell to hands and knees, leaning back on his haunches. Blink again. Now the Bunnyman was stalking the perimeter of the lawn. Lightning fast, holy shit, every time Mr. Thomas blinked, that bunny appeared in a different spot. Crazed. Broken. He prowled like his bones were made of glass and he kept catching on their sharp, jagged edges, making him seize up and jerk his limbs in impossible ways.
“Dad?”
Mr. Thomas couldn’t pull his eyes away from The Bunnyman to look at his son. “It isn’t real, Luther.”
The Bunnyman stopped pacing and snapped his head back towards Mr. Thomas.
Mr. Thomas thought that he had lost his whole fucking mind. The Bunnyman gnawed at the air between them, teeth click click clicking.
Mr. Thomas thought of how slow and stupid a wooden baseball bat is.
Flicking a mouse trap out of his way, the Bunnyman wiggled a paw and stepped onto the lawn.
“Luther, it isn’t real.”
“Dad,” said Luther.
“It isn’t real.”
“Dad, stop crying.”
Melinda Scully is a writer, competitive swing dancer, and spreadsheet wizard. She will soon earn her MFA in creative writing at the University of British Columbia, and her work has so far appeared in The Normal School and Cleaver Magazine. You can find her on Instagram/Twitter @melindascully.
6 January 2023
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