Cursed Bunny(17)

For a long time, the CEO’s grandson lay in bed staring up at the ceiling with unfocused eyes, breathing and doing nothing else.

Then one day, the child stopped breathing.

Returning home from the elaborate funeral they’d held for his son, the father locked himself in his dead son’s room and wept for a long time. He placed the bunny lamp his son had loved so much on his lap and wailed his son’s name again and again as he stroked it.

The National Tax Service determined that the company not only had to pay back all the taxes it had skillfully avoided in the past but even the taxes it had actually paid, plus interest. No matter how desperately the company tried to prove they had paid the latter, the company didn’t have a single legible document to submit as evidence.

When whispers began that the company’s operations and financial documents had vanished, its debtors insisted there was no proof they owed the company anything and refused to make payments. At the same time, the company’s creditors demanded they pay up immediately. The CEO was livid. He went to a secret safe where he kept a notebook that only he knew about, a record of all of the company’s assets and bonds and debt documents. But when he opened the safe, he found his trusted secret notebook torn to shreds, chewed to pieces—a pile of useless pulp.

This should have been the moment when the CEO had a stroke and never regained consciousness. The cursed bunny, however, was not that generous. The CEO did not have a stroke.

It was the CEO’s son who had the stroke. After the man had cried himself to sleep on his dead son’s bed, he woke up the next morning, put a foot down on the floor … and promptly broke his right ankle. As he fell, he flung out his left arm to protect his head, breaking it in three places along with sustaining a hairline crack.

The CEO’s son was barely forty, a healthy adult man. He had never had a serious injury in his life, nor had he ever broken a bone before.

As the CEO’s son lay in bed with large casts on his right leg and left arm after the bones had metal rivets surgically screwed into them, the company began to deteriorate at a rapid rate. The CEO was so busy running, both away from his creditors and after his debtors, that he didn’t even have time to visit his only son in the hospital. The CEO’s son anxiously interrogated his wife about the goings-on of the company, and determining that he couldn’t just lay there as the company fell apart, he tried to get up from the bed. But the moment he put his undamaged left foot on the floor, it broke. He fell over and fractured his tailbone.

The subsequent operation took nine whole hours. Afterwards, he was brought back to his hospital room where, under the influence of anesthesia, he rested motionless for a long time save for the occasional nose-wriggling and nibbling motion of his lips.

The bunny nibbled away.

The CEO finally came to see his son in the hospital on the day the company went bankrupt. Like a mummy, his son was almost completely wrapped in bandages and fast asleep thanks to the tranquilizers.

When he woke from anesthesia the first time, he mumbled something about a rabbit sitting on the bed. At first, no one took his words seriously. The CEO’s son insisted that there was a rabbit sitting on the bed, eating away at his blanket. No one took that seriously, either. The CEO’s son finally yelled that the rabbit was eating his feet, and he tried to jump out of bed. His bewildered wife called for help, and a group of nurses rushed in and tried to restrain him. The man resisted, shouting something incomprehensible about bunnies. Two nurses held down his arms and his wife hugged his torso. That was how his right arm broke and two of his ribs got cracked.

After that, every time he opened his eyes the CEO’s son screamed about bunnies, and his bones would break each time they restrained him. They broke when the people trying to help pinned him down, they broke when he banged his hand against his headboard or struggled against his casts. The only way to allow him to recover was to keep him constantly sedated.

The CEO stared at the bandage-wrapped face of his unresponsive son, who was locked in insensate despair. His precious grandson was already dead, and his sole heir, a son who was third in a generational line of only sons, had become this worthless, broken lump. The company was gone, and all he was left with was debt—the unpaid taxes and fines, his loans, and his son’s hospital fees. He couldn’t take his son out of the hospital when his bones shattered at the slightest touch. And it would all be over if he himself ended up in jail for tax evasion.

Grandfather stops the story and stares into the lamp. The bunny underneath the tree is plump, with fur that is white except for the tips of its black ears and tail. It’s made of a hard material, but the luminous bunny next to Grandfather seems covered in soft fur, its ears about to twitch and its mouth about to make nibbling motions.

“So what happened next?” I ask. Of course, I know what happens next. The questions I ask when the storytelling stops in the expected places aren’t questions per se, but prompts for him to go on with the story, unwritten stage directions we have more or less come to agree upon.

“They all died,” says Grandfather, absently stroking the ears and head of the bunny. “The CEO’s son died in the hospital, a funeral was held, and the next day, the CEO himself fell from the roof of his company building.”

The bunny flicks the tip of its ears.

Never make a cursed fetish for personal reasons. Never use a handmade object in a personal curse. There are reasons for these unwritten rules.