Cursed Bunny(16)
The company undertook a building-wide professional extermination, dumping all of their things on the lawns including the contents of the vault. As all this went on, the CEO’s grandson did his homework by the light of the bunny lamp at home and slept in a bed right next to it. The boy loved the cute lamp of the bunny sitting beneath a tree and bragged to his friends that his grandfather had been gifted it from overseas. The CEO’s grandson touched the lamp several times a day, stroking the bunny’s back in order to switch the light on and off.
The bunny did not chew up the paper in the house of the CEO’s son.
It chewed up something else instead.
The CEO’s grandson was in his last year of elementary school. Aside from being smaller than average for his age, he was a strong boy with no history of illness. According to his mother, he was a nice enough child who enjoyed going to school and did well in his studies, albeit a little too enthusiastic about kicking a ball around instead of doing his homework or cramming for exams.
No one paid much attention at first when he began to forget his homework and school materials. He was the grandson of the brewery owner and had always been a good student; the teacher didn’t scold him so much as nag him. But the child soon began to forget not only his homework but the fact that he had been assigned it in the first place, and in a burst of irritation he lashed out at his teacher, prompting a call home. “Please keep in mind that children enter puberty early these days and can get moody,” the teacher said to the mother, and the mother acquiesced.
Around the end of winter vacation, the boy began obsessing over food. He insisted he hadn’t eaten when he clearly had, stole food from the fridge, hid snacks around the house, and threw screaming fits when his mother tried to take the food away. His family assumed it was because he was a growing boy. Thinking he might be going through a growth spurt, they bought more food, and a greater variety at that, but the boy’s greed, paranoia, and temper only worsened.
Then, on the first day of school in the spring, the boy got lost on his way home. It was the same path he had walked every school day for the past six years, a distance he could cover in ten minutes, fifteen at most.
A neighbor found him sitting in the middle of the road, dazed from having wandered around the vicinity of the school for a long time. The boy smelled terrible. The neighbor who brought him to his mother, embarrassedly mentioned that the boy seemed to have soiled his pants, and she turned around and quickly walked away before the boy’s mother could even recover from the shock and thank her.
The boy’s parents took him to see a doctor. Their local pediatrician recommended they take him to a larger hospital. But even the university hospital in the city could not find anything wrong, this being a time before MRI scans. The pediatrician at the university hospital did observe, however, that the child’s eyes seemed unfocused as he rocked back and forth mumbling unintelligibly, and that he had peed himself where he sat. The doctor recommended consulting a psychiatrist. His chair fell on its side as the child's father jumped to his feet and cried, “Are you suggesting my son is mad!” His face turning crimson, the father screamed the most wretched curses at the doctor as he pushed aside his pleading wife and swept up his child in his arms before leaving the hospital. The blameless mother tearfully begged the doctor for his forgiveness as she bowed several times before following her husband out.
The child’s condition only grew worse after their visit to the university hospital. The child could no longer recognize his parents’ faces, repeatedly soiled his trousers, could not walk properly, and kept muttering to himself but no longer formed meaningful words. He spent most of his day lying in bed and staring up at the ceiling with unfocused eyes, gurgling now and then, but the one thing he consistently did was obsess over the bunny lamp. The bunny lamp was moved from his desk to his nightstand, and the child, while mumbling at the ceiling, turned to look at the lamp from time to time, which seemed to reassure him, and he became anxious and screamed whenever anyone else tried to touch it.
While he slept, the child would sometimes wriggle his nose, nibble, or flick his ears like a bunny, but none of the adults around him noticed. In his dreams, the child sat under a tree with a white rabbit with black-tipped ears and tail, pleasantly eating away at his own brain. The more he nibbled away at it, the narrower the child’s world became until he was unable to leave the little bit of land he shared under the tree with the bunny. By then, he could not comprehend anything except for his delight in being with his friend.
As the CEO’s grandson slowly died on the bed next to the bunny lamp, the seasons changed, as did the government and the world. The people who had enabled the CEO to monopolize the liquor market with his cheap and tasteless spirits lost their positions of power. The company, for the first time since its founding, was hit with a tax audit.
By that point, the invisible bunnies had shredded the company’s performance reviews, account books, financial statements, and daily memorandums. Every operating profit notification, every record of taxes paid to the National Tax Service, everything was in pieces and completely illegible.
The bunnies had moved on to the wallpaper of the office building, leaving teeth marks on the walls and doors. The company’s important documents were now nothing but a pile of hamster bedding, and the building itself began to look shabby. It was clear to the workers that the company, both inside and out, was falling apart. But the CEO refused to acknowledge this and continued to turn a blind eye.