Velvet

But inside her, there is always velvet, velvet with its give and yield, the kind you find at a pet store, a bin full of long ears and noses busy snuffing up nerves among the cedar chips and their eyes opening wide as if rabbits couldn't know what softness brings, as if they'd never know the smell of something long stored away now brought into light, and now too her mother with a camera pointing at her, red child on the lap of the Easter rabbit, softness of the body hiding inside the costume, eyes glinting from the wide holes in the mask, not a single sobbing breath of wind down the trail of mesquite and broom foot-printing the hills of some rancher's land. The bird dog lifts his ears to the sound of velvet, the girl listens to the drawn cries of a crow, her father walks with the silence of the shotgun, waiting for the pointer to find scent, the rabbit at the end of it blinking, its wide eyes shrinking from the scuffle of their feet like velvet settling, laid over lines, drying across the ceiling of an uncle's garage where they talk inside the smell of salted skin. At least three dollars for each good pelt he says, and they scream like children when, sleeves rolled over his forearms, he brings the club down on their heads, saving their feet for cheap key chains, for luck that softness doesn't seem to have inside of cages, chicken wire, tubes of water, and sometimes boys who try kicking the cage around to see what happens to velvet tumbling. And, in the after quiet, she bites the hands reaching toward her, so they stone her, they open her belly and pull some things out, open the pink albino eye and groan at the fluid inside. Then they bury the carcass without thinking first of washing their sticky hands in the sink before eating dinner, before setting the table, in the still softness of her beige room, she sits on the carpet picking at the velveteen of Bunny's stuffed neck, the rabbit's eyes dull with scratches, eyes left behind on her bed at night when she stands in the hall, hearing her father breathe in his room in the darkness, on the futon, kicking off the sheets. Awake from a fluid dream of a woman's eyes staring from behind a gag, her white skin settling in fat pools around her, naked, bald. And a man's voice said,this is your rabbit, so she woke to this dream inside her, with his teeth wrapped in her hair, and his hands inside her thighs where he fingered her coldly. But it has always been like this—wild, insidious, and commanding because she gives to it, fascinated by it and caught by it, as velvet only listens and is quiet.