Cursed Bunny(15)

A guard glimpsed something white in the warehouse. It looked like a fluffy bit of cotton, but it disappeared as he approached it. He figured a draft had blown it away. The next day, the little white object had become three, and then six the day after that. The guard thought the retreating white figures seemed to hop just like rabbits, but wild rabbits couldn’t possibly be living in that part of the city. He thought nothing of it—there were trucks that needed to be loaded for deliveries to branch offices. The guard, branch worker, truck driver— none of them noticed the white-with-black-tipped-ears-and-tail bunnies that hopped aboard with the crates of alcohol.

Soon after, the warehouses of both the headquarters and the branches, as well as retailers, reported some kind of infestation that resulted in chewed-up paper and wood and pea-sized droppings everywhere. Mousetraps and rat poison were of no use, not even cats helped. Someone glanced at the droppings and remarked that they were too large for rats and looked more like the work of rabbits. The woman who presented this accurate opinion worked as a clerk and had a niece in elementary school who raised rabbits for some kind of nature class, and she had visited the hutch a few times to feed them dried grass. But no one in the branches and no retailers had seen any rabbits inside the warehouse, and the clerk was no rabbit expert, just some woman who spent her days taking inventory and fetching coffee until she would inevitably quit to get married. Everyone ignored her.

The company headquarters and all the branches forced every employee to participate in a rat-catching campaign across the warehouses. Many rats were indeed caught, and the campaign, while leaving the workers exhausted, did result in cleaner warehouses. But all it took was another night for the warehouse floors to be littered with shredded paper as well as animal droppings too big to be from rats.

As paper kept getting damaged, the company decided to move their most important documents, like old account books and factory blueprints, to their offices. While they did so, no one noticed that the white bunnies with black-tipped ears and tails, invisible under the daylight sun, were also moving into the office.

A rumor spread that the distillery was overrun with mice. As so much of the local population worked across the company—at the headquarters, branches, warehouses, and the factory—it was inevitable that word got out in the area.

One branch fired a warehouse worker as a warning while another division brought all of their workers together in one room and begged them to be careful about spreading rumors. The dismissed worker happened to be taking care of his old, bedridden mother as well as three sons and five younger siblings, and he was later caught by the night watchman when he broke into the warehouse with a container full of gasoline to set fire to the place. Meanwhile, in the region where they had gathered workers to lecture them on spreading rumors, a full-page opinion piece appeared in the local newspaper about the dangers of rats when it came to food sanitation.

News about the “rat” problem spread like wildfire all over the region, and the company decided to host a tasting event when they determined they were past the point where threatening their workers was effective. They came up with a plan where workers and their families, people who lived near the facilities, and most importantly, the pillars of the community and other important persons of the region were plied with spirits from the warehouse and shown how there was no problem with the sanitation or quality of their product and how much the company was contributing to the local community.

The event was held on the lawns of the headquarters. The CEO himself attended, as did his son the vice-president who had a child in elementary school. The CEO’s grandson, bored with the long speeches, the loud music, and most of all the drinking the adults were indulging in, slipped away to wander around the company grounds. The CEO’s daughter-in-law found him crouched before an open door of the warehouse. “I was playing with the bunnies.” She asked where they were. The boy dragged her into the warehouse by the hand. He pointed at a bunny lamp perched on top of a dusty steel filing cabinet and begged her to let him take it home.

His mother said they needed to ask his grandfather because the object belonged to the company, and she quickly forgot about it as she dragged her son back to the outdoor event. But the boy didn’t forget. His drunk grandfather, upon hearing what the boy said to him about wanting a strange object in the warehouse, told him to go ahead before turning back to drinking with the important adults.

The PR event was a success. Everyone stayed late, drinking the free alcohol into the wee hours of the night. Having endured it for as long as she could, the CEO’s daughter-in-law left with the child when he began whining from exhaustion. The boy hugged the bunny lamp tightly in the car that took him home.

The “rat” rumor seemed like it had finally been laid to rest, and the fundamental reason for the rumors—the bunny lamp—had been moved from the warehouse to the house of the CEO’s son.

But the bunnies that had already spread throughout the company’s branches and retailers’ warehouses did not go away. The ones that had moved into the offices with the documents didn’t go away either. They continued to multiply and chew up everything in sight.

Every night inside the drawers and steel cabinets, all manner of documents—order forms, contracts, business performance reviews, account books, and financial statements— were chewed to shreds.

Even when the most important documents were moved into the vault, the cash, cheques, and promissory notes within began to get chewed up as well.