Cursed Bunny(32)

Flashing sunlight or suffocating darkness, the blinding sky or the damp and moldy air of the cave, water as cold as ice or sticky humidity and feces—there was nothing in between for the boy and no foretelling of what would happen when.

It came to the boy once a month, pierced his bones, and sucked at his marrow.

It was impossible for the boy to see the passage of day or night, and therefore he wouldn’t know if a month had passed or a year. Though he could not calculate how much time was going by, the visit of It was the single thing that was regular and predictable in his life.

The boy didn’t know what It was; he didn’t even know what It looked like. It seemed to writhe in the darkness. It was large, strong, scary … and brought great suffering.

It would insert a sharp, hard thing into the boy’s vertebrae and suck. Starting near his backside above his pelvis and working its way up, vertebrae by vertebrae, toward the boy’s neck.

The order of how it happened was always the same. The small, white dot of the cave entrance would be covered by a sudden, black mass. A rustling, a squelch. Damp, musty, stiff feathers would press down on the boy’s wrists and ankles. Then a sharp, hard, and indescribably terrifying and painful object punctured his vertebrae.

After It left, the boy wouldn’t be able to move for a while out of pain and fear. When he’d finally make an effort to get up, the feeling that his backbone was shattering would make him cry out.

There was no intended meaning or direction to the boy’s screams. The boy had no family he knew of. He didn’t know who his mother or father was, did not remember where he had come from or where he had been wandering, and what faint traces of memory he had were scattered into the depths of oblivion.

Despite this, the boy prayed that someone, whoever that may be as long as it was someone, came to rescue him from this cave. That they would take him wherever it may be as long as it wasn’t here, to a place where this pain and darkness did not exist, he prayed with all his drained, wasted heart.

Of course, no one came to his rescue. Since no one knew the boy existed, no one realized that the boy had disappeared.

II

Alone in the cave, the boy tested how far he could move from the stake that held his chains to the ground. To the rhythm of his clanging chains, as he walked he mumbled in a low voice and hummed something resembling a song. This wasn’t from some emotion like joy, it was merely his futile attempt to somehow fill the repugnant space that was this empty darkness and the hours of dread.

When his chains hit the cave wall and he saw a small spark, it was, to the boy in his darkest and emptiest time in his young life, the happiest moment he had ever experienced. Yearning to see the small but beautiful light once more, he pulled his chain again and again, hitting the walls and ground, until the light of another spark allowed him a glimpse of a small insect.

Since being dragged into this cave, this was the first time the boy had seen a creature other than himself living in there. Not that he was sure if it was living or dead, as he hadn’t had a good look at it.

He saw the insect for less than a second, a truly brief interval. The insect was slowly, diligently crawling up the wall of the cave. Before the chain had struck the rock, the insect had been crawling up the wall, and with the spark, it had briefly cowered, then continued its way through the familiar dark at a slow, leisurely pace. They both lived in the same cave, but the world of the boy and the world of the insect were so different. While the boy had finally found another lifeform with him, it was completely disinterested in the pain, expectations, or hopes the boy held.

The boy smashed his chains again and again against the rocks, but he never saw the insect again. That was the first time he sobbed in earnest. Not the cries of someone driven mad with fear, but the tears of someone who understood and was saddened by their own loneliness—the tears of a human being.

III

Every boy who manages to survive in this world grows into a young man.

As time passed, the boy felt the chains grow shorter somehow. When he extended his arms or legs during his slumber, the feeling of steel digging into his flesh or the pull of the chains would jolt him awake. When he was dragged outside the cave and thrown through the too-bright air that was like crashing through sheets of ice, he could feel, as he struggled and resisted, that It was also struggling with him now.

One fateful day, the boy was again thrown into the freezing water headfirst. It bit into the boy’s legs as if to break them, plunging him several times into the water and back out again. On the last plunge, he sunk all the way to the bottom of the water before he was picked up by It and thrown into the darkness of the cave again. It once more shoved its hard and sharp thing into the boy’s neck.

The boy thought he was finally done for. He clearly felt the flesh on his neck tear and the relentless, painful sharp thing digging in between his bones. Thinking his neck would be cut in half, he closed his eyes.

When he woke, he was still alive.

He could not turn his head or move his arms and legs. It took much longer than usual to recover, and there was none of the raw meat or greens that had been placed around him like before. The boy trembled from hunger and fear as he lay crouched in the dark, not knowing when It would return to cut off his head.

It did not appear for a long time.

When he could finally move his limbs again, the boy realized he was no longer a helpless child anymore. The boy who had become a young man started to latch onto the small glimmer of hope of leaving the cave on his own. That possibility stirred in the movement of his limbs and gradually solidified into a plan.