Bunny Mona Awad Quotes

Why do you lie so much? And about the weirdest little things?", my mother always asked me. "I don’t know", I always said. But I did know. It was very simple. Because it was a better story.

But I wasn't listening. I wasn't stopping. Because we were already running away again, me and my imagination.

We never joke about bunnies, Bunny.

I've never really not written, never not had another world of my own making to escape to, never known how to be in this world without most of my soul dreaming up and living in another.

Can I take your coat?” Cupcake offers. I turn to her. She’s looking at me so hopefully. So willing to take a coat I’m not wearing, I almost want to give her my skin.

The poets brace themselves for imminent, overeducated poverty.

She was a great girl-shaped forest. She was a thing on fire. Her hand was leaves and smoke and snow and flesh all at once.

Don’t trade one kind of blindness for another.

They laugh. What’s so fucking funny? I want to say. But I don’t. I laugh with them. Ha. Haha. Hahaha.

I look at all of my dreams and nightmares distilled into one man-shaped shape. All the love and hate I have in my heart plus one fucking bunny.

Behold the lavish tent under which the overeducated mingle, well versed in every art but the one of conversation.

You’re supposed to yell “fire,” though. Because no one comes when you yell “rape,” didn’t you know that, Bunny?

Their cheeks are plump and pink and shining like they’ve been eating too much sugar, but actually it’s Gossip Glow, the flushed look that comes from throwing another woman under the bus.

How empty and emptied I felt walking away with all my words still on his floor. Wanting so badly to pick them back up. Take it all back. Wipe away the night, my dumb tears, my endless tumbling out of words. I never meant to give this to you.

We've read Jane Eyre too, you cunt, and we've read The Waves, and when we read it, you know, we wept for minutes. Then he stars weeping.

The real world lady, it's out there. Do you even know that? You're going to have to get back to it sometime.

Our mothers always said to look hard at the things of this world that are owies on the eyes because they will put more colors in your inner rainbow.

The truth is, if you go to Warren, no matter what is going on in your personal life—hair trouble, existential malaise, ax murder—you do the reading.

He called me dark, twisted, and mean.” “How sweet. He’s in love.

Then, Beowulf says wistfully, "Your beauty is nuanced and labyrinthine like a sentence by Proust.

Disorientation can be a very interesting space to occupy as a writer, Samantha. You should try it as an exercise over the holidays. It could be quite illuminating for you, I think.

It starts to rain. Hard. Because that’s the kind of weather that follows this kind of girl. She’s so slutty and dark she makes the clouds slutty and dark too. Pregnant with this dirty rain that starts to fall hard on both of us.

A song I used to hate that I loved surround-sounds my soul. It is a song about nightmares dressed as daydreams, about trading your soul for a kiss. I think not this song, never this song, but my soul is already singing along, riding its swells like an ocean wave, shimmering.

Read. Be a guest in other worlds.

I look at her lips shiny and thick with so much gloss. There’s a wavering quality to her voice, like a car swerving down a dangerous road.

I swallow. My hands ungrip the cliff. Trust. I will not fall, I will float. Up into their high blue sky full of fluffy clouds and rainbows. Up, up, up into the pink mist and the laughing light.

Because you simply can't sit back and allow your best friend to date an animal man of your own creation and say nothing. You can't. And say nothing? That would be just wrong, on so many levels.

Close my eyes. Let the night become dawn. Let the snow outside fall and fall like it will bury us. Please bury us. It would be totally fine by me.

What's the lesson here, Smackie? Don't jump to conclusions? Never lower your gaze first.

The real world, lady. It’s out there. Do you even know that? You’re going to have to get back to it sometime.

What do you think, Samantha?” Fosco asks me. That it’s a piece of pretentious shit. That it says nothing, gives nothing. That I don’t understand it, that probably no one does and no one ever will. That not being understood is a privilege I can’t afford. That I can’t believe this woman got paid to come here. That I think she should apologize to trees. Spend a whole day on her knees in the forest, looking up at the trembling aspens and oaks and whatever other trees paper is made of with tears in her languid eyes and say, I’m fucking sorry. I’m sorry that I think I’m so goddamned interesting when it is clear that I am not interesting. Here’s what I am: I’m a boring tree murderess. But I look at Vignette, at Creepy Doll, at Cupcake, the Duchess. All of them staring at me now with shy smiles. “I think I’d like to see more of the soup too,” I hear myself say.

When I look back at her, shes staring up at the moon, smiling serenely at it like the moon is her new best friend....

Like we could hug and hug and hug until our ribs crack and our hearts burst and our lungs collapse and our arms break off and still. We’d still be hugging air. No body.

working as a bookstore wench, a waitress, an office wench, a waitress again—​the only jobs I could seem to get with my English degree.

But I doubt you did any of those things unless you have a mullet or a deep sense of irony.

She looks so much like a cupcake that when I first met her at orientation, I had a very real desire to eat her. Bite deeply into her white shoulder. Dig a fork in her cheek.

You do realize you’re in a cult, don’t you? You’re in a fucking cult.” This word hurts our ears so we cover them and think-sing a song from the latest Disney musical, which is our new favorite musical.

Their bloody faces regarding me so kindly, so openly, that I know this is a friendship moment.

Fuck you, poets. You think you are so smart, so cool with your word art. You have no idea.

Until all my words had spilled to the floor. I was too drunk to pick them up. So leave them there.

Because life is shorter than we are, she says, so why beat around the bush?

Whenever I read one of Victoria’s vignettes, I always feel so dumb because I can hardly understand them at all. And then I blame myself. I think, Kira, this must be just too brilliant for you to grasp. Surely you must have missed something. Even though there’s always been this small voice inside of me that says, Um, what the fuck is this, please? This makes no sense. This is coy and this is willfully obscure and no one but Victoria will ever get this. I would in fact need to live inside Victoria’s spoiled, fragmented, lazy, pretentious little mind to get it. And who apart from us, apart from me, is going to be willing to do that? To work all night with a Victoria Decoder? Who would even care to? And then I feel like screaming JUST SAY IT. TELL ME WHAT HAPPENED. TELL ME WHAT THE FUCK THIS MEANS AND WHAT YOU DID WITH HIM EXACTLY.

The mothers always look around the campus like extremely interested buyers, their jeweled hands rubbing the backs of their fawnlike spawn as if to say: This could be yours, this could be yours.

Oh my god, how much does Bunny love Pinkberry? She loves it so much she loves it so much she loves it so fucking much oh my god. We are so happy right now, we could hop, we could dance. Who will dance with us?!

Because at Warren, the Body is all the rage. As though everyone in the academic world has just now discovered that they are vesseled in precarious, fastly decaying houses of bone and flesh and my god, what material.

That I think she should apologize to trees. Spend a whole day on her knees in the forest, looking up at the trembling aspens and oaks and whatever other trees paper is made of with tears in her languid eyes and say, I’m fucking sorry. I’m sorry that I think I’m so goddamned interesting when it is clear that I am not interesting. Here’s what I am: I’m a boring tree murderess.

We huddle-hug on the velvety green among the cherry blossom trees. We link arms. We close our eyes the better to feel each other's bodies. We form a hot little circle of love and understanding. We press our faces into our faces, our cheeks against our cheeks, our eyelashes tickling our skins like little hummingbird wings, like Bunny nose twitches.

You want to fuck, not be fucked,” Victoria says. “Samantha,” Eleanor intones, “is this making sense?” I stare at them all through Kira’s pink heart-shaped glasses. This is how she must see the world all the time. I look at their dark pink faces, so suddenly grave. I should call the police. I should run to Mexico. “Totally.

Three bunny explosions later, in which the ax gets bloodier and bloodier, the air becoming thick with the scent of dead bunny and boy, Odysseus IV is before us.

The pink pony inside me weeps softly.

I get it, Samantha. Books, they’re like old friends. When I was here this summer, I carried four or five with me all the time.

Because books are dead, Smackey, didn't you know?

Unlike my street, which smells of sad man piss, hers smells of autumn leaves.

Samantha Heather Mackey thinks she understands everything, but she fails to understand the depths of the human heart. She fails to understand the depths of our heart. Our heart our heart our heart! We’ve read Jane Eyre too, you cunt, and we’ve read The Waves, and when we read it, you know, we wept for minutes.

I bite", Ava says, sliding out of the booth. "It’s a terrible, voluntary affliction".

what good is it to be left with no trace, to be wounded without the pleasure of a scar?

I am a boring tree murderess

Sad. Very sad, Samantha. To be lost like this. Sad, sad, sad that when someone asks you, What do you want? nothing comes to mind but a pair of fists clutching little broken bits.

And that's when I realize that whatever pain I have, whatever true want that lives under all this greasy, spineless needing to please isn't something I want to give them.

Or is it our amazingly empathic hive mind that we make by hugging so that we become one of those animals with a brain and heart in each tentacle that connects to a bigger, cosmic heart-brain that is like a shared, all-seeing third eye? Who knows? Who cares?

That not being understood is a privilege I can’t afford. That I can’t believe this woman got paid to come here. That I think she should apologize to trees. Spend a whole day on her knees in the forest, looking up at the trembling aspens and oaks and whatever other trees paper is made of with tears in her languid eyes and say, I’m fucking sorry. I’m sorry that I think I’m so goddamned interesting when it is clear that I am not interesting. Here’s what I am: I’m a boring tree murderess.

I hope you don’t mind this music,” he says. “No.” I want to take the CD and throw it out the window, possibly setting it on fire first.

Then the light goes out. A wind comes. The curtains catch fire. The bunny explodes.

Think whatever you want, think the worst, I dare you.

We think of it as art meets life, Bunny. We’re putting art into the world.

Oh, Bunny, I love you. I love you, Bunny.

Why are you apologizing, Samantha?” Creepy Doll says, her breathy voice full of demonic emoticons flanked by winking smileys.

A silence so profound it's noise. White noise. Beneath which I hear laughter.

I used to go to bookstores but I can’t go in them anymore because I buy too many books.

Being with you,” he says to Ava, “is like being in literature. I have no idea where you’ll lead me next. But I’m excited. My life could change. And I’m not alone anymore.

God this is depressing, Ava says. And boring. Aren’t you bored? It’s what I can afford, I tell her. Because even if she’s not here, I might as well talk to her all the same.

...an endlessly entitled fury that will drive them toward the shiny pretty things of this world and not stop until they have claimed them.

Because you simply can’t sit back and allow your best friend to date an animal-man of your own creation and say nothing. You can’t. And say nothing? That would be just wrong. On so many levels.

I walk toward what I think is the school, getting lost again and again until at last the moldering, vacant storefronts switch to juice bars and dog salons and I glimpse the Ivy Bubble. The towers upon which Ava and I have sat like gargoyles. Everyone on the street suddenly goes from looking like an extra in a zombie movie to the star of a French New Wave film.

And here’s what I realize: she would never wear mittens shaped like kittens or a dress with a Peter Pan collar. She would never say, Love your dress, if she fucking hated your dress. She would never say, How are you? if she didn’t care how you were. She would never eat a lavender cupcake that tasted like perfume or wear a perfume that made her smell like a cupcake. She would never wear lip balm for cosmetic purposes. She would never wear it unless her lips were seriously, seriously cracked. And even if they were, she’d still put Lady Danger on them, which is the name of her lipstick, this bright blue-red that looks surreally beautiful on her but when I tried it on once made me look insane. Her perfume smells like rain and smoke and her eye makeup scares small children and she wears pumps even though she’s at least two inches taller than I am and I’m a freak.

i think of that spring morning, just before dawn. how she appeared at my side on the bench. how i felt so suddenly alive with possibility. saw in her a wondrous world, an open hand, a person i knew in my bones would be someone i’d love. how i had no idea. how the not knowing was the most wonderful and terrible thing. maybe i could do it again. imagine her back. live on the roofs and trees of my mind with another her beside me forever. take her mesh hand in mine and this time never let go.

I don’t have those hair salon novels anymore. I like to think they were swallowed up in the Falls after she died. In my memory, those years remain my most prolific writing period although I’ve never really not written, never not had another world of my own making to escape to, never known how to be in this world without most of my soul dreaming up and living in another. Until I came here. Sometimes it’s good to take a break, the Lion said to me last January, whisking his tea. Focus on other things. Read. Be a guest in other worlds. Perhaps you’re growing. Evolving. Trust, Samantha. Patience.

That’s just what you think you saw,” Victoria says.

Samantha,” he says, “there is no need at all for eye water.

Because it is that time of day where we thank each other for breathing.

Behold the lavish tent under which the overeducated mingle, well versed in every art but the one of conversation.

Her neighborhood is obscenely beautiful. I cannot help but observe this as I stand on her marbled steps, flanked by stone griffins, beaks open in midscreech. A line of stately houses, a canopy of grandly bowing trees. Just a block from campus, off a poshly quaint street lined with bistros that offer champagne by the glass, cafés that make the cortadas with the ornate foam art that all the faculty drink, shops selling cold-pressed juice and organic dog treats. Unlike my street, which smells of sad man piss, hers smells of autumn leaves.

Why do you lie so much? And about the weirdest little things? my mother always asked me. I don’t know, I always said. But I did know. It was very simple. Because it was a better story.

Sometimes when I tell myself or Ava the story, it grows teeth and it’s something. Definitely something. Other times, it comes apart in my hands like air. But if I remember all the right details. If I tell them in the right order. If I pause in the right places, trail off in the right places . . .

The light from her stolen lamp buzzing over her feathery head like a flickering motel sign. Sipping champagne from a wide-mouthed flute. Where does she get it? Never mind. Places. Ava never seems to worry about money. Yet somehow her apartment is like a movie of arty poverty in Paris. Run-down but chicly so.

The way she says alone makes it sound like a cave. Like some hideous, dark cave whose oozing walls are teeming with all the unpleasant things of this world, and I am crawling willingly, brazenly, into this awful space of my own free will. Shoveling the vermin I find scuttling across the floor into my mouth for sustenance.

love you, Bunny. And then they hug each other so hard I think their chests are going to implode. I would even secretly hope for it from where I sat, stood, leaned, in the opposite corner of the lecture hall, department lounge, auditorium, bearing witness to four grown women—my academic peers—cooingly strangle each other hello.

I miss you, Bunny. This summer was so hard without you. I barely wrote a word, I was so, so sad. Let’s never ever part again, please?” Ava laughs out loud at this. Actually laughs. Throws her feathery head back. Doesn’t bother to cover her mouth with her gloved hand. It’s a delicious, raucous sound. Ringing in the air like the evening’s missing music.

Because she looks like a cupcake. Dresses like a cupcake. Gives off a scent of baked lemony sugar. Pretty in a way that reminds you of frosting flourishes. Not the forest green and electric blue horrors in the supermarket, but the pastel kind that is used at weddings or tasteful Easter gatherings. She looks so much like a cupcake that when I first met her at orientation, I had a very real desire to eat her. Bite deeply into her white shoulder. Dig a fork in her cheek.

They've pulled apart from one another at last, their twee dresses not even rumpled. Their shiny heads of hair not even disturbed. Their skins glowing with health insurance as they all crouch down in unison to collectively coo at a professor's ever jumping shih tzu.

It makes us feel a little like God. No, we can’t go that far. In fact, we are a little fearful of God right now, if he’s out there. She, Bunny. If She’s out there. Or It. We like to think of It more as an energy. And don’t worry, It would approve. So approve. Of us. Because look at what we just did. Look at him.

A single room on the west side, which I really thought was just fine even though it didn’t quite pass my suicide visualization test. Could I picture shooting myself here? Definitely I could. Hanging myself? Sure. Some nights, I could even see the noose swinging from the light fixture on the ceiling. But I figured with a few well-placed posters, I might mute the sound of my own future death cry that would sometimes flood my ears upon entering this single room with galley kitchen.

Their hair grew shinier and longer, their eyes red, and I did not know which small hand belonged to which pink-and-white body, which coo came from which glossy mouth, which fingers were getting tangled in my hair. And then a voice like warm fur, her balmy lips very close to my ear. Go outside and bring us a bunny, Samantha.

I can't just give it away like that, Samantha. I wanted to leave it open...to interpretation." He smiles slightly at the word "interpretation," recalling perhaps key moments in his own genius. "You need to tell me what you did. You need to tell me exactly." "Do I?" He's pissed now. And not a little heard Samantha. I am his audience of one, do I not realize that? The work he put into this thing, the planning. He was expecting frankly for me to be blown away. Instead here I am asking for little annoying details and worse -- explanations. "I mean, why bother if I'm just going to bother telling you exactly? Where's the fun in that? Why bother making art at all?

So do you guys go to Warren?” I ask, downing the rest of my punch. They look at each other. One of them, Lars I think, coughs in my face. Then, Beowulf says wistfully, “Your beauty is nuanced and labyrinthine like a sentence by Proust.” I laugh, but Beowulf looks dead serious. He raises his glass to me. I notice his punch is in a plastic sippy cup. That he’s wearing black leather gloves. “Melanie Shingler is a whore compared to you,” says the boy next to him. Blake. “Pigeon-toed. Bad eyeliner. I couldn’t see it then because I was a fool but I have since developed my perception.” He too solemnly raises his sippy cup to me. He’s also wearing black leather gloves, I see. They all are.

Rich playing poor, Ava would say. Fake white trash by the overeducated. The worst kind. It happens at art school all the time. Fosco is looking down at Vignette’s piece the way she normally does, the way she looks at all of their pieces but mine. Like they’re fussy, brilliant, but ever-so-slightly retarded babies. What went wrong in the birth canal? She holds a lantern up in the form of a concerned brow. Well, she’ll announce at last, what do we think? Thoughts? “I’m fascinated by the soup,” Cupcake says, as though she is actually fascinated. I notice the urge to hug her has distinctly faded.

They each look at Ava, then at me, in turn, scanning down from our heads to our feet, their eyes taking us in like little mouths sipping strange drinks. As they do, their noses twitch, their eight eyes do not blink, but stare and stare. Then they look back at the Duchess and lean in to each other, their lip-glossed mouths forming whispery words. Ava squeezes my arm, hard. The Duchess turns and arches an eyebrow at us. She raises a hand up. Is there an invisible gun in it? No. It’s an empty, open hand. With which she then waves. At me. With something like a smile on her face. Hi, her mouth says. My hand shoots up of its own accord before I can even stop myself. I’m waving and waving and waving. Hi, I’m saying with my mouth, even though no sound comes out. Then the rest of the Bunnies hold up a hand and wave too.

Samantha Heather Mackey thinks her stories are so fucking great! Samantha Heather Mackey doesn't say it but she thinks she's too good for the whole fucking world! Samantha Heather Mackey acts poor but why then does she behave like a princess? Samantha Heather Mackey slept with her professor! Sucked him off! For preferential treatment! There is no way in hell that Samantha Heather Mackey can be that tall, she wears stilts! Samantha Heather wears stilts so she can look down on us! Oh, ho, ho, ho she loves fucking second of that!! Samantha Heather Mackey thinks we have everything under the sun, that we sleep on a bed of gold, and meanwhile she sleeps on a bed of dirt. That she has nothing, nothing, and she thinks this makes her deep. It doesn't make you deep, Samantha Heather Mackey, it just makes you rumpled and it makes you smell of old potatoes. Samantha Heather Mackey thinks she understands everything, but she fails to understand the depths of the human heart. She fails to understand the depths of our heart. Our hearts our heart our heart! We've read Jane Eyre too, you cunt, and we've read The Waves, and when we read it, you know, we wept for minutes.

Too bad, Samantha, they said to me afterward. Sometimes you fail. Miserably. Hopelessly. It happens even to the best of us. Well, not to us, it’s never happened to us. But it CAN happen. In theory. And that guy! I’m so surprised he didn’t rape us. Repeatedly. Or kill us. Or do some sick thing in between? And oh my god, that story he told about the wolf? So weird. Obviously twisted. Probably we shouldn’t have told him our names. He won’t remember, will he? I mean, it’s not like we’re traceable or anything? Like he could track us down? Like on Facebook or anything? He’s insane, remember? Murderous. Probably he doesn’t even have Facebook. I was like a breath away from calling the police the whole time. Or campus safety. Or like, just screaming “rape.” You’re supposed to yell “fire,” though. Because no one comes when you yell “rape,” didn’t you know that, Bunny

Like she’s my therapist, and I’m trying to pull a fast one on her, which she’d expected, but come on, Samantha, let’s get, you know, serious here. Like she knows I think I’m better than everyone else. Like my stammering shyness, my headphones, my dark, unassuming clothes, my politeness are all well and good but she can see through it, yes, Samantha, and what she sees, what it’s masking, is a very deep hate, a very deep rage, a very deep social bruise, what happened there, Samantha? Like she knows that I have nicknamed them all and, well, how sad, really. But being a moon goddess, a more highly evolved artist, a being full of nothing but love and tropical shore (though she is Upper West Side via Charleston), she’s going to tolerate it, love me from a distance all the same, wish me well on my stunted little path where I clutch my rage close like a book or a pet rat. We are all on our own paths after all, aren’t we?