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Ode to Bunsies

by LAUREN BANS

Some facts about Bunny:

My uncle gave him to me at Thanksgiving dinner when I was two. I started crying immediately. Perhaps it was a symbolic reenactment of the Native Americans proffering dead rabbits to the Pilgrims, and the Pilgrims shooting them.

His name is simply Bunny. Shut up. Fuck you.

He is a boy. His fav food is Skittles. And though he's technically older I just say he's 4 in bunny years, thus he is eternally young.

For an entire year all Bunny said to anyone was "Ou est la baguette avec la beret?" after I watched some PBS kids show featuring a baguette wearing a beret who repeated that line incessantly.

I once made my little sister shoplift me a Snickers by threatening her with "Bunny won't be your friend if you don't!"

Bunny was on the cover of a Paul Golding book about homosexual relationships and existential malaise. This freaked me out to no end, because I had never seen another bunny like mine before and thought he was singular. And because then of course I read the book.

This is Bunny last May spooning with Dawn's dog Nikko. They immediately recognized a gentleness in each other.
When I got scarlet fever in 5th grade bunny came to the hospital with me. My parents gingerly told me that we might have to give bunny back to his bunny family and I was like, "Don't patronize me. If you touch him I will hate you guys forever." He took a Lysol bath instead.

When boys stay over I hide bunny under the pillow. Once my gentleman friend is snoring I pull bunny out and spoon him as ush.

Bunny is not anorexic. He is just so thin because he wakes up either pressed between my thighs or smashed under my stomach.

In a writing class I took in college I wrote a story about a grown man who still slept with his female teddy bear, and the people in my workshop were like, "It's great how you use the stuffed animal as a foil to showcase his fear of human intimacy" and I was like, you're all such pretentious idiots, this is just a charming story about a man who loves his teddy, fuck you.

I made one boyfriend have post-coital conversations with bunny about the sad trajectory of Chris Hitchens' career. Bunny would whisper his replies in my ear and I would be like, "Well Bunny disagrees with you about The Trial of Henry Kissinger." I think I was testing the boundaries of obnoxiousness here, but he thought it was adorable. He started to say "I love you" to Bunny. I knew then that I had to break up with him, because if I could make him have conversations with my stuffed animal then he loved me way more than I deserved and I was already abusing that power.

Every Thanksgiving my Grandma tries to throw Bunny away. I think the thought of me still sleeping with him keeps her up at night. She somehow believes Bunny is preventing me from having a husband.

When I go home for Thanksgiving I put Bunny on the top shelf in my closet where both my dog and my 5'4 grandma can't reach him.

Lauren Bans is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Brooklyn. You can find her website here. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here. She twitters here. You can find an archive of her writing at GQ here. She last wrote in these pages about Modern Romance.

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