Cursed Bunny(14)
Sales for my grandfather’s friend took a nosedive. His factory ceased operations. No matter how many times his company denied the lies spread by their larger rival, consumers refused to believe them. My grandfather’s friend wanted to drink his company’s product in front of the cameras to prove how safe it was, but no broadcaster wanted to put him on the air. And there was no internet in those days, nowhere for him to turn to once he was shunned by the newspapers and television. He had no legal recourse because you couldn’t record phone conversations or screenshot texts back then—it was impossible to determine how rumors were spread. The courts ruled that there had been no slander or libel, and my grandfather’s friend ended up with debts from both his business and the lawsuit. Leaving a note in which he apologized to his family, he hanged himself, still only in his thirties. His wife, who had found the body, fainted several times during the funeral proceedings and would soon join her husband in that place from which they could never return. Their suddenly orphaned children were thankfully taken in by a relative who lived overseas, but that was the last anyone would ever hear from them.
The very company that had spread the lies about “industrial-use alcohol” bought out its ruined competitor at far below market value. The manufacturing processes that my grandfather’s friend had devoted his life to developing were also turned over to his competitor, who buried the work in the bottom of a dark vault.
“Why were they buried in a vault?” I naively asked when I first heard this story.
“That evil company’s purpose was to sell lots of cheaply made spirits and earn piles of money, not come up with new and better products,” explained Grandfather. “And if they’re not going to make their products better, they’ve got to prevent others from doing so if they want to stay competitive.”
And that was why Grandfather made the cursed bunny.
“It is no sin to make and sell good spirits. But for the alleged crimes of not being connected to powerful people, for not having the capital to make such connections, an entire family was smashed to pieces and its remains scattered to the winds.”
Grandfather shakes his head. “My friend was so good, so kind, so dedicated to his company, and devoted to his wife … He was such a lovely friend …” Despite having told this story scores of times, Grandfather’s voice always trembles when he gets to this part, his eyes turning red. “To murder them all, to destroy a family … How can such things be allowed?”
But such things are indeed allowed, and such people who allow it are everywhere. Which is exactly why my grandfather, my father, and I could make a living out of cursed fetishes.
But to my grandfather, I say nothing. As always, I simply listen to his story, so familiar from having heard it many times.
The target of the curse has to touch the cursed fetish with their own hands. That’s the most important aspect of any cursed fetish and the trickiest part in getting it to work. Grandfather summoned all his connections, high and low, to get in touch with someone who knew someone who knew yet another someone who worked for a subcontractor for the company that killed his friend. He asked the first someone to hand deliver the bunny lamp to the competitor company’s CEO. There was a switch embedded in the back of the bunny that made the light turn on when stroked like a real live pet rabbit.
This someone who knew someone who knew yet another someone did as he was told. He visited the competitor company’s CEO and said the lamp was a gift from the subcontractor company, demonstrating the on and off switch with gloved hands. The CEO simply nodded his head, distracted by some papers he was signing, took a call passed on from his assistant, and abruptly left his office saying he had a meeting with a member of the National Assembly.
This someone who knew someone who knew yet another someone had no choice but to leave the bunny lamp behind in the CEO’s office. On his way out, he implored the CEO’s assistant sitting outside to not let anyone touch the lamp except the CEO, but as he was merely a nobody who worked for a subcontractor, the assistant simply nodded her head like her boss had done and went back to reading her magazine.
Grandfather, having heard what had happened, sighed as it occurred to him that the course of the curse would be altered slightly.
But he figured as long as the cursed bunny was somewhere in the CEO’s house or office it wasn’t a complete failure.
The bunny lamp stood on a table in the CEO’s office for a day until being moved to the company warehouse when the workers were preparing to go home. That night, the bunny nibbled at any paper in the warehouse—cardboard boxes, crumpled newspapers used as packing filler, stacks of old documents, account books going back years, all of it. No one came to the warehouse at night, so the bunny nibbled away undisturbed.
The next morning when the warehouse guard opened the doors, the floor was strewn with bits of paper and rabbit droppings. The guard muttered something about rats and buying rat poison as he cleaned up the mess.
The bunny, still unnoticed in the corner of the warehouse, nibbled at archived papers all through the next night as well. The guard occasionally passed by outside as the bunny munched through the warehouse, and the night watchman also went about as usual with a flashlight in his hand, but the two men only glanced into the small window of the warehouse door; no one could imagine what was happening inside. Once the bunny had chewed up every bit of paper in the warehouse, it started on the wood.