Sean Paul Connolly is a queer writer. His work is inspired by fairy tales, surrealism, black comedy and horror, with an emphasis on sharp-witted dialogue. His short story ‘Anna’ is featured in the Querencia Press anthology Not Ghosts, But Spirits Vol. I, and his poetry has been published in Bloom Magazine as well as featured in the short film October by CakePunch films. He is currently working on a collection of short stories.  

 

Instagram: seanpaulconnollyuk 

Email: seanpaulconnolly94@outlook.com 

 

Rabbit Head

It wasn’t the first time Alice had been down this rabbit hole, but this time she wasn’t sure how she was going to crawl out. She’d had several variations of this conversation before:

         “Hey Mum. Hey. Um. Oh no nothing’s wrong, I thought I’d just call to ask how you’re doing? Good. Good, great… Um, actually, that is something I wanted to ask you about. Do you think you could just send a bit extra this month? Yeah, yeah, I know. Right. I know, believe me, I really don’t want to ask, it’s just. Yeah. Yeah, you’re right. So, anyway, how’s Dad?”

         Alice didn’t have too much time to dwell on her mum’s ‘ultimatum’, because there came a knock on the door. It was her flat-mate, Maisie. Maisie hadn’t known Alice all that well when she moved in, but she felt that the Alice she was now living with was not the same Alice she knew before. In fact, Maisie could never be sure which ‘Alice’ she would get each time she opened her bedroom door. Sometimes Alice was in bed, wrapped in her duvet like a half-metamorphosized caterpillar. Other times she was sitting on the edge of the bed staring into space, as if she was expecting an assailant to break in. Maisie felt bad for Alice, but was also a little jealous that she didn’t have parents who could afford her rent. It had popped into her head a couple of times that she might open the door to find a pool of blood or a pair of ashen feet suspended mid-air from the ceiling. It hadn’t happened yet, but those thoughts were present whenever Maisie turned the doorknob.

         “Oh, hey Alice, you’re up early today!” echoed Maisie’s endorphin-drenched voice. Maisie was up every day at the crack of dawn to go for one of her runs. Alice was not. The truth was, it wasn’t even particularly early, it was simply early for Alice.

“Yeah, I…actually haven’t been to bed,” Alice replied. Alice had a strange relationship with her bed. It was a place that she didn’t want to leave, yet it was also a place where all of her thoughts came out to play, that she needed to escape.

“So did you end up calling your parents?”

“Yeah.”

“And?”

“They told me this was the last time they were going to help me and that I need to get a job. They’re right. I’ve just been putting it off. I’m just scared after last time. Plus, I’m lazy, clearly.” Alice had had a job interview that week. It had not gone well.

“What are you drawing?”

“Oh, it’s nothing.”

“Oh, I quite like it. Is it a woman with a…”

“Rabbit Head. He’s actually a man.”

“Oh, where’s his…”

“I haven’t drawn it.”

“Oh. Cute.”

“Thank you. Just something to keep busy, I guess.”

***

         “Why do they have to make waiting rooms so intimidating?” thought Alice, looking around at the waiting room and all its cold colours – white and off-white. The posters explaining heart disease, bowel cancer and chlamydia screenings. The ‘encouraging’ mental health ones were the worst. They also seemed to be playing the most painfully maudlin music that they could possibly find. She wondered if this was just what was on Radio 2 or if someone had curated this playlist. Coldplay, Adele, Dido (wow that’s a throwback…they had to go back in time to find something depressing enough for their purposes). Alice actually quite liked this song about not surrendering and going down with this ship, the melody was pretty, but she didn’t like it for right now. Fuck. Now she was going to associate the song with this experience. She didn’t like it anymore.

         Alice started doodling a sketch of ‘Rabbit Head’. In the picture, Rabbit Head was sitting down in a waiting room. He was curled up in a ball, clutching his human legs and sweating. In a seat directly opposite, Alice drew a man with the head of a wolf, who was staring at Rabbit Head with bloodlust in his eyes. Rabbit Head noticed the Wolf’s hungry stare, but he was politely obeying the sign behind his head which read ‘PLEASE WAIT.’

         “Alice Allen,” came the voice of a woman. She was small-looking, middle-aged, wearing ordinary clothes, no white coat. She didn’t look particularly brilliant or remarkable, aside from a mass of curly red hair. She also didn’t look threatening, which was a relief.

         The interior of the Therapist’s office was not what Alice was expecting. It was bright red. The colour of blood… She had a strange feeling that the waiting room was simply the outer shell of the practice and now she was inside the beating heart and there was no escape. This feeling was intensified when the therapist shut the door behind her, there came a curious sensation that Alice had left the world, as she had known it, behind.

         “Take a seat,” said the Therapist and Alice obeyed as if she had no choice. Did she have a choice in here? She couldn’t tell… Having taken up a great deal of time with ‘formalities’ such as “Do you smoke?” and “Are you gay?” the Therapist finally asked:

“So, why did you reach out for help?”

“Oh, well. Um, I’ve always had anxiety since I was a child,” replied Alice, forgetting the lines she’d prepared. “And over the pandemic, I started having depression and suicidal thoughts and nightmares.”

“Nightmares?” This detail seemed to grab her attention ahead of ‘suicide’.

“Yes.”

“Could you tell me more about that?”

Alice hadn’t expected to be asked about the nightmares.

“Sometimes I have these very um vivid nightmares. And when I wake up I just struggle to feel normal again.”

“Okay,” said the therapist as she scribbled something down. “Could you give an example of a nightmare that you’ve had recently?”

“Um.” Alice scanned her brain. “Well, this one isn’t recent, but I once dreamt that I was stuck in a giant hourglass and it started filling up with sand and I was trying to get out, but it came up and up and up to my nose and I felt like I was suffocating and I woke up gasping for air, thinking that I’d died.”

“Wow.” The Therapist looked shocked, which took Alice by surprise.

“I probably watched Aladdin or something, I don’t know.” She laughed nervously.

“I’m sorry?”

“Oh.” Not a Disney fan. “In Aladdin, there’s this scene where um the Princess Jasmine is. Oh never mind…”

“No, carry on.”

“She’s stuck in an hourglass. So, I don’t know,” Alice laughed again and decided to be honest, “I’m just trying to make a joke and failing.”

“Okay. So, you said you were twenty-three. Do you have a job? Are you a student?” Oh, here we go.

“Oh, um, I was doing Illustration at Camberwell, but I dropped out…”

“Why?”

“I realized I couldn’t draw.”

“Another joke?” The Therapist stared at Alice as if she was looking right through her. As if she could see her every artery.

“No. No. Well kind of, I don’t know…”

“What happened? Can you take me back to the moment you decided to leave?” The Therapist observed Alice closing her eyes, not seeing what Alice could. The red blood in the sink. The echo of her professor’s voice screaming “Alice, what are you hiding? Alice?” sharply staring at her wounds as if she had been a naughty child. The horror in the faces of each of her classmates that until that moment had only existed in nightmares where she’d been naked. Exposed.

“It was a number of things,” Alice finally replied. “I just stopped turning up to classes and I fell behind and then I just got embarrassed…” Something changed in the Therapist’s eyes that seemed to Alice like annoyance.

“Why did you stop turning up to classes?” the Therapist probed. “What is it that you don’t want to tell me?”

“I don’t know, I-I thought I was answering your questions. Well, I had a breakdown. It was kind of in front of everyone.”

“What was it like?”

“What do you think it was like, it was fucking horrible. Sorry.”

“Why are you apologising?”

“I was just kind of rude.”

“Is it important to you not to be rude?”

“Um. Yes. I guess so. I think it’s important to everyone.”

“It seemed like you were angry at me for asking about what it was like for you?”

“No. Well.”

“Do you think it’s a bad thing to be angry?”

“…Yes.”

“Why?”

“Well it… Um. I’m sorry.”

“It’s alright. I wonder if you ever let yourself feel angry. We all have moments where we feel…”

“Yes, but, it’s not very healthy the way I feel angry.”

“Not very healthy?”

“I have violent thoughts. I mean in my nightmares I am out of control.”

“Do you ever think that that’s your sub-conscious releasing what you feel inside?”

“So you think I should hurt people?”

“I’m not saying anything, just observing.”

“Ok.”

“What is your ultimate goal of coming to therapy?”

“Well, I want to feel better, to be happy.”

“To be happy? Just kind of slap a band-aid on what you’re feeling. It seems that you’re looking for me to magically cure you, but you know I can’t do that if you’re not willing to feel uncomfortable things.”

“I do feel uncomfortable things. My whole life is uncomfortable.”

“Is it?”

“Yes.”

“It feels like a lot of your life is spent running away from things. I mean, you quit your job, you quit college. Who’s to say you’re not going to quit again?”

“I feel like you’re antagonizing me.”

“Do you?”

“Yes.”

“Or do you just not like the truth?”

“Are you happy now?”

“Why would I be happy that you’re upset?”

“It feels like this is what you want, for me to be sad?”

“I think this is how you feel, all I have done is tell you what is going on in your life. It sounds difficult, I would be sad if I were you.”

“Okay, thank you.”

“Alice, where are you going?”

“I don’t think this is helping.”

“I think you should sit down?”

“What’s the point – you think my life is beyond mending.”

“Well, I can’t promise to ‘mend’ anybody’s life. It’s not up to me.”

“Great. Have a nice day.”

“Alice…”

***

         Alice couldn’t sleep that night. She knew that if she shut her eyes, she would see something terrible. It always happened when she was carrying feelings like this inside. She tried everything everyone suggested – meditation, breathing exercises, yoga, running, but Alice’s mind was stubborn, when something got in there, she couldn’t help but hyper-fixate on it. Her dreams were vivid, and it was often difficult to tell if she was asleep or awake. She decided to draw a picture of Rabbit Head visiting a therapist. Rabbit Head was lying dead on the sofa (artistic license), while the therapist sat reclined in her chair. The therapist had the head of a wolf, she was holding a bow, which she had just fired. The arrow had landed directly in Rabbit Head’s heart.

***

“Alice?” came Maisie’s voice through the door.

“Yes.”

“Are you going to get up today?”

A harmless, yet hurtful question. Everything was hurtful, hurtful to the core these days.

“No.” A simple answer, the truth was more complicated. My body wants to get out of bed, but my stupid little rabbit head won’t let me.

***

A few days passed where Maisie didn’t see Alice at all, but the next time they spoke, it was Alice knocking on Maisie’s door.

“Maisie, Maisie, Maisie.”
“Alice?”
“Maisie!”
“What the fuck? Are you okay?”
“Yes, yes, yes, Maisie I’ve had an idea. An amazing idea!”
“Hmm?”
“You know how you were telling me that I should sell Rabbit Head.”
“Sell what?”
“Rabbit Head, Rabbit Head, you know the pictures of the man with the rabbit head.”
“Uh, Alice, what time is…”

“Sorry, sorry, it couldn’t wait. Well I said it was ridiculous, because who wants to buy my stupid little drawings, but I had an idea, I can write books about him. Children’s books and then I can illustrate them and… Listen, listen to what I’ve come up with.” Alice cleared her throat. “Rabbit Head wanted to get out of bed, his body was willing, but his stupid little rabbit head wouldn’t let him.”

“Is that a story?”

“Yeah. No. Um. Some of them are sentences and some of them are longer like…” Alice flicked through her notes. “Okay, no, I haven’t written a long one yet, but don’t you see Rabbit Head is like mental illness.”

“What are you…”
“Like imagine a man with a rabbit’s head. Rabbits are constantly scared, constantly on the run from predators, always fearing for their lives, ready for fight and flight. A man with a rabbit’s head is in a constant state of anxiety… I can write these books for children and I can illustrate them and with them I can help to destigmatize mental illness and it’s for children, maybe I can help someone before it’s too late and maybe I’ll save someone’s life… Maybe MINE.”

“Alice, I need to sleep.”

“Okay. I’ll see you in the morning.” Alice wanted to go to bed, but Rabbit Head had no time for sleep. Rabbit Head just wanted to keep on writing and writing and drawing…

         When Rabbit Head got an idea in his head there was nothing that could take it out.

         Rabbit Head goes for a job interview. Rabbit Head decided that he needed to earn some extra money, so he looked in the newspaper and found a listing. It was not ideal, but it would give him the money he needed.

When he got into the interview, the interviewer asked him:

“What work experience do you have?” Rabbit Head tried to answer with his human brain, but nothing would come out of his frightened rabbit mouth. The interviewer kept pressing him and pressing him until he jumped up and screamed “My job in life is trying not to go completely fucking insane! And you know what, I’m doing a fucking good job of it!”

“Whoa,” was the first thing that came out of Maisie’s mouth after Alice read to her at breakfast. “I thought this was meant to be for children?”

“It is,” said Alice. “Sorry, I guess I could take the language out,” she said, scribbling. “Apart from that do you like it?”

Maisie took a minute to think about it.

“Never mind.”
“No, I do like it,” Maisie said. “Sorry, I’m just slow to wake up this morning.”
“Oh, okay. Are you going to go for a run today?”

“No, the doctor said I need to rest,” Maisie sighed. She had somehow torn her hamstring after forgetting to stretch. “I was over-doing it, I guess… So what are you going to do with the stories? Are you going to publish them yourself or…”

“I thought I’d get in touch with some publishers and try and pitch it, I’d love to talk to you about that actually because… Maisie, are you alright, you look a bit…” Alice knew the word she actually wanted to say, but her filter interrupted her and so she said “tired.”
“Oh, I didn’t sleep well last night, anyway I’m going to go to my room and work…”
“I’m going to do the same.”

“Oh did you manage to get a job?” Alice looked up and smiled and replied with an ‘isn’t it obvious’ inflection.

“Rabbit Head is my job.”

***

         Weeks and months passed and Alice and Maisie had become even more like two ships in the night. After tearing her hamstring, Maisie had started leaving her room less and less. The doctor had told her that she should avoid running for around two weeks, which she knew was sensible, but the less she exercised, the less she wanted to do anything at all.

Maisie had been so wrapped up in herself that she hadn’t even thought of Alice. After all, Alice had seemed pretty happy, being creative for the first time since she’d dropped out of college. She still had lingering anxieties about opening the door to Alice’s bedroom...the pool of blood…ashen feet…especially as she hadn’t done so in so long. She’d only seen Alice here and there for weeks whenever she was running to the door to pick up yet another delivery parcel. But every time Alice and Maisie happened to catch sight of each other, Alice seemed happy. So Maisie was sure as she turned the doorknob that she wouldn’t see anything too out of the ordinary. As the door swung open, the air left Maisie’s body and blood left her face.

The walls of Alice’s once stark room were covered in rabbits. Some were hand drawn, some of them were cut from magazines and stuck onto the heads of dismembered photographs of bodies. One particularly interesting one was that of a nude woman who appeared to be bleeding from her crudely drawn vagina. She had a photo of a rabbit attached to her head and it was pasted on by two band-aids – two bloody band-aids.

“Alice,” Maisie stammered, “you’ve decorated?”

“Oh hey Maisie, yeah it’s my mood-board,” Alice excitedly replied. Maisie smiled nervously and pointed to the splotch of blood on the evidently female bunny.

“Is that paint?”
“Oh no that’s blood.”
“Blood?”
“Yeah…you know, my blood…”
“Your blood?”
“From my period, you know?”
“W…why?”
“Oh you wouldn’t understand, you’re not an artist…”
“No…I…”

“Maisie, are you alright, you look…tired.”

“I guess I am tired…maybe I’ll just…go back to bed.” Maisie admitted as she started to stumble away to get the hell out of Alice’s room as fast as she could.

***

         “Alice Allen,” came the voice of a man. The Publisher’s office was not what Alice was expecting. It was bright red. The colour of blood… She had a strange feeling that the waiting room was simply the outer shell of the publishing house and now she was inside the beating heart…and that there was no escape. This feeling was intensified when the Publisher shut the door behind her, there came a curious sensation that she had left the world, as she had known it, behind.

“Take a seat,” said the Publisher and Alice obeyed as if she had no choice. Did she have a choice in here? She couldn’t tell…

“Okay. Wait a minute, I need to call a few more people in here,” he said and got up. What happened next reminded Alice of the trick where dozens of clowns come out of a tiny car. More and more people came in, each of them dressed in white, Alice started to wonder if there would be enough space for all of them in this moderately-sized office. She quietly struggled to breathe as she listened to the Publisher call his secretary on the intercom asking for more chairs.

“Okay, Alice, would you like to begin your pitch.” Alice felt a chill and she cleared her throat and stood up, with her sketchpad in hand.

“Alright. My name is Alice Allen, I’m an illustrator and um first-time writer from London. I have an idea for a series of children’s stories called ‘Rabbit Head’.” She felt a lump in her throat. “I have some illustrations here if you’d like to pass them around… Um. Rabbit Head is a man who has the head of a rabbit and so…he is filled with fear and fight-or-flight responses. Therefore, doing ordinary things in his day-to-day life is made more challenging with the constant fear of being hunted by predators.” Alice froze as she heard the sound of everybody in the room simultaneously turning the pages of their notepads. “Obviously, these books touch on some serious topics such as mental health issues, but I wanted to make them accessible and um…” Alice could feel that her voice was about to break so she had to wrap this up quickly. “Make sure children feel less alone. Any questions?” One of the women put up her hand.

“Have you thought about how you wanted to end it?”

Alice thought this was a strangely worded question, but she was terrified of sounding too challenging to her potential employer.

“To end what?”
“The stories, surely there will be a point where they come to an end?”
“Oh. I didn’t really think about that, no…”

“It’s just because in each of the stories, Rabbit Head seems to go through a lot of challenges, he keeps getting battered by life and it is quite dark, it makes me wonder how is it all going to end for him? Because he never seems to learn or fight back, is he just going to die?”

“Um. I don’t…”
“I think that’s a good point,” one of the men chimed in. “Have you thought at all about the message that this story might send to children?”
“The message?” Alice replied shakily.
“Yes, I mean, you say that the stories talk about mental health, but it feels as if the message of these stories is pretty bleak, it just seems like mental illness is a shackle that Rabbit Head never escapes from, like, what is the endgame here?”

“Yeah, I don’t think it’s good for children to read stuff like this,” said one of the publishers, who looked significantly younger than the others (practically a child), “I feel like saying that these stories are about mental health is kind of virtue-signaling. You don’t give them any kind of hope or actual help, in fact I think it is exploitative and you know what, this makes me really angry.”

Alice gulped.

“That we put stuff out into the world like this and say that it is helping mental health when all it is doing is over-simplifying and exploiting an issue that affects people who are extremely vulnerable in society.”

Alice didn’t know what to say, she thought about arguing back, but her rabbit head wouldn’t let her.

         Alice closed her eyes and when she opened them, the publishing house had changed into her bedroom and all of the publishers were replaced by the rabbits on her wall. She wondered if it was possible that she’d fallen asleep for the first time in what felt like a month. Even though everyone had stopped talking, she still heard a noise in the back of her head that was driving her mad. It sounded like someone was in her room, chewing on paper.

 “Who’s there?” Alice asked.  No response. For a moment, she thought she’d been watching too many horror movies, when she saw him. Rabbit Head. He wasn’t on her wall in one of her various psychopathic mood-boards, he was standing in front of her. A naked man with the head of a rabbit stitched onto where his decapitated head used to be. He was crudely stitched together as if whoever had committed this great crime against nature had done it without thinking at all what they were accomplishing. His rabbit head was lifeless and drooping, but his human body moved towards her and he held something towards her like a present. Alice was too shocked at being confronted by her own monstrous creation to take in what it was until he was inches from her face. It was a decapitated rabbit’s head. As soon as she clocked this suddenly two arms appeared, as if from her bedroom walls, to hold her back. Her head jolted back and she saw two nurses with rabbit heads. One was holding a giant knife and she was holding it above her head. She started to scream, but the rabbit nurse silenced her by stuffing a carrot in her mouth.

***

         After going through all the formalities of “Do you smoke?” and “Are you gay?”, the Therapist asked Alice what had brought her to therapy.

“Well, there’s been a lot of things that have happened or…not happened recently. But they’ve made me think about things and…I started thinking about my childhood.”

“Your childhood?”

“Yeah, you know when I was younger, I was taken out of school and I had to go to hospital.”

“Oh,” responded the Therapist, flicking through the notes she’d made from their preliminary phone call. “You didn’t…”

“Mention that,” interjected Alice. “I never do.”

“What did you go to hospital for?”

Alice swallowed nervously, searching for the right words. The Therapist ran her pen through her curls.

“It’s alright, Alice, take your time…”