None of it. Just them. And me. In a regular rich-girl living room. Beige as fuck. And all around us the regular dawn beginning to break. Finger by pink finger.

Her hand was leaves and smoke and snow and flesh all at once.

“Samantha, it isn’t giving itself to us. It’s being . . . coy,” she spits. “Willfully withholding,” Bunny Lion says. “Unnecessarily inaccessible. Not delivering on its premise.” “And it was a dazzling premise. Who could deny that?” “Not me.”

So I tell her. Everything. About the Bunnies. About the boys. About “Workshop.” What happened after she went away. How I made this boy only I didn’t know it at first because he didn’t seem like a bunny boy. At all. He was so different from the others. He was actually so real seeming, I didn’t know he was a bunny myself. Until later. And by then,

The Wound is tapped and it bleeds. I must say, though, I’m a little concerned by the androcentric leanings in today’s pieces so far. Did you notice that, Samantha?” “Yes.” “As female storytellers, writing at this level, at this institution, we must be mindful of this. Do we really want to enforce the narrative that we’re ‘saved’ by a boy?

Normally Fosco adores Caroline’s pieces, fragmented narratives involving anxious young women who clearly have never had jobs, who instead brood through afternoonish times of day, think quirky thoughts, bake, and are wistful.

When we all leave the maternal embrace of the Cave and retreat to our own individual dark spaces—to spin the pain and fear and shame that lives there into so much literary gold.

Lists. So many lists. The words I don’t know surrounded by tangled vines and lidless eyes. I hate my handwriting. The barely legible, fevered script slanting so severely it looks like it could keel over any minute, then veering off the line entirely and tumbling into the margins in little suicidal clusters.

All her bell-skirted dresses arranged in a neat little line like fascists,