...Here comes Peter Cottontail, hopping down the bunny trail... . And remember, shoppers, here at The Mall on the Mount, the only thing that doesn't rise...is the prices. Dean figured it must be at least 120 degrees inside the costume, but he didn't dare perspire. Mythic holiday figures don't sweat. That's what they told him when they handed him the dirty white suit, the fur matted with chocolate, sticky with marshmallow.
And they don't take a dump either. You got to take a shit, they told him, do it before you come to work. No kid in this place is going to see The Easter Bunny walking out of the bathroom, a copy of People magazine under his arm.
By now, she'd be several hours late for work. Soon, they'd start calling her apartment. Soon, they'd send someone over to check. Soon, they'd be coming for him. Dean cast a wary eye at the doors leading into the mall, wondering how fast he could run with 18-inch rabbit slippers on his feet.
She just wouldn't leave it alone. Pushing, driving home the point even after he'd surrendered: refusing to simply allow him to be wrong. There had been a moment, when she realized that she had pushed him too far. Their eyes met in a connection more all-consuming than that of any sexual embrace, and they were one. He knew he was falling, and she knew that he would take her with him.
There is a moment in descent when you realize that if you reach out, you can make it stop. Dean had felt his hand connect with something. He tightened his fist, trying to hold hard to his compassion, his humanity, his reason. For a second, he believed that he had caught himself. Then, only the empty feeling of falling, the realization that he had gone too far, that he could not rise. He felt nothing, believed in nothing, until he disappeared and that man that he feared became him.
Go to work, his mind told him. Put on the rabbit suit. Pretend that mythic holiday figures do exist. Pretend that the past didn't happen, and perhaps it might not. But Dean couldn't go back. He had had his moment, his chance to grab ahold and save himself. But he had been too weak. He had let go.
His nose began to itch, but encased in the giant rabbit head, he had no way to scratch it. He tried using his facial muscles to press the cartilage to one side, then the other, all the time afraid that any movement at all would give him away. He sat, trying to disappear within his immobility in a world that continued to go on around him. He sat, and he waited. As long as he didn't move, they wouldn't notice him. All he had to do was sit, immobile, for the rest of his life.
Dean looked out through the wire mesh that covered the big, saucer-shaped brown eyes of the rabbit head. Here comes Peter Cottontail... . At The Mall on the Mount...prices. The sound bounced around inside the papier-mâché skull as he sat, terrified that some little kid would walk by and wave, and he'd forget, and wave back.
Matthew Lubich lives outside the failed utopian community of Greeley, Colorado, with his wife Lesli Bangert. His fiction has appeared in various small literary magazines, mostly in the Pacific Northwest for some odd reason. As partner of the playwrighting cooperative BROKEN GOPHER, INK., he and partners Michael K. White and Kyle J. Bunch have scored a variety of big and small theatrical productions in Los Angeles, off-Broadway, and points between. Several of their plays have been made into films. Lubich's writing was once described as "toilet innuendo" by one critic.
For more stories by Matthew Lubich, click here.
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