All Rabbits in a Hat

Laiza had fourteen other rabbits to contain at the house on the lip of the bayou. Many were the white, red-eyed kind whose ancestors had once been used for testing. Some might still remember the pinch of a needle the way your grandmother’s suffering has a way of finding you in a dream. No one ever wanted the red-eyed whites, and no one could ever return the looks they’d give. Like they wished you’d become unborn.

Milagros was the only person who could bear and dish the gaze of white rabbits. At nearly ninety-six, she was always there to return their wild eyes, red around the rims. Laiza thought it good to help her. It had been the fifteenth week in a row without rain, and the rabbits were fitful.

“It’ll rain again. A fog is coming,” Laiza said to a big white buck. His spine was stiff, the tail pumping. Rabbits do not bare their teeth, but you would know their fear heartily if you tended to over twenty of them for six days in a row. Laiza huffed with effort. Her knees hurt, crouching close to the ground like that. Sometimes, knees retire at the young age of forty-one.

She ought to check on Milagros.

She left the remaining rabbits on the patio. Laiza had come to visit Milagros last week out of concern; Louisiana had been generous with its water rationing, but Laiza didn’t know if Milagros’ rabbits required more.

The old woman was sitting up in bed, eyes closed. The house was slouching into its years, but the mending men would come by soon to pour new lime clast concrete as they’d done for the rest of the state’s geriatric architecture. She faced the nearest wall, where a television stand hosted a bowl of duckweed and pond water and a single lamp. Milagros couldn’t stand televisions on account of her migraines, which, as Laiza had found out, stood for almost all her personality.

“It’s raining somewhere close. Georgia, I think,” she said. Her skeletal fingers prodded the base of her neck. “Oh, yeah. Georgia is getting rain.” Her eyes peeled open. “Laiz? That you?”

She stood, swaying predictably; she caught herself on her walking cane and Laiza stood there, feeling silly with open arms.

“It’s me.”

The room smelled of jasmine perfume and old Bibles written in Tagalog that Milagros mentioned she had never read. A vacuum machine scuttled across the floor, beeping loudly at her ankles. She looked down slowly and swayed. Her robotic cane contorted with her, shifting and gliding to accommodate her meager weight. She blinked.

“Laiza!”

“Yes, ma’am. Do you want me to make groceries?”

“This storm in Georgia. I can feel a little pain. Right here.”

Milagros’ voice was long worn out, as if every day she were sucking on lozenges just to get back a little song. And her words held their own slur because it was tiring to talk. Laiza had to listen carefully whenever she spoke.

She said it was her fault, that storm. She hadn’t induced the migraine; it came on its own before she could take her pill, and there it was on the outer edge of her skull like biting fish floating in the shade. It was raining in Georgia.

Once, Laiza had told her that storms might cause migraines—that there was science to support this. Something about pressure and change. Her father had been a weatherman. Her mother was a nurse. But Milagros has refuted this because it was her pain that brought the storms, not the other way around. Laiza simply nodded along.

“It’s just a little ache, so I know it’s a little rain. In Georgia.”

She joked, “We might need you to have a big one if we’re gonna get any rain here.”

Sorrowful eyes. “Rain? How long’s it been?”

“About three’r four months.”

Milagros looked shocked. Her eyes followed the new shape assumed by her cane.

“I’m scared, Laiz, of a big one. Is my chocolate in the fridge? It’s not so easy to induce anymore.”

Laiza said, “Hey, I was just kidding—don’t go trying to give yourself a migraine or anything. That was a bad joke on my part.”

Milagros pressed on about the rain. Laiza nodded along, guiding her from her room to the living room. Outside, the bayou leaked fog, as though it would rain on its own and the house and the orchids and all the rabbits would be drenched.

The rabbits. They were chewing on Milagros’ vintage furniture.

Laiza sucked in a breath and apologized as she leapt for the rabbits, the wretched whites and the soft duns and the broken pieds and one tiny agouti. Behind her, Milagros watched the fog build with concern. It was white over the crisp yellow grass. It didn’t often fog like this.

“Don’t worry about the rain. I’m gonna make groceries.”

“Groceries…” Clarity blossomed in her eyes. “Oh, Laiz, you don’t have to do that.”

Laiza insisted she wanted to. Milagros gave her extra money for chocolate—a lot of it, milk, with fruit if they had any, because she was going to eat what was left in the fridge.

#

When Laiza returned, the sun was hot on the roof of the old stilted house, burning the moss brown. Laiza raced a delivery robot to the lift, frowning at its package label. Hot sinigang, lumpia, and pho from two family-owned restaurants—mighty rivals for her franchise fried chicken.

She stepped over the machine, its tune bleating against the pale cream walls of Milagros’ entryway. Laiza called for her. A faint response came from behind the glass doors of the patio, where the rabbits were still fornicating and chewing on furniture.

Her face was red as she opened the sliding door with two hands, her cane molding to her hip like a third leg.

“Here, ma’am. Let me help you.”

“I ate it all. The chocolate. It won’t be long now. You’ll get your rain.”

“Okay. Here, I got you some fried chicken, some cereal, and all the other stuff.”

She thought about keeping quiet, about slipping away with a nod and a promise to come back the day after tomorrow. As she watched Milagros ease into a chair, her eyes bright and focused on her robot-delivered meal, Laiza felt funny enough to ask why she ordered food if she were expecting groceries.

“What? Oh, the fried chicken is for dinner. And White Rabbit candy for dessert. This is all for lunch. Now sit down and have some, though I won’t be talking much now, honey.”

Outside, the light peeled back and the wind started to churn the hot shimmery air. Laiza looked out the glass doors and through the patio window.

“Son of a…”

The window was beading up. It was good rain—gentle on the dry earth, which wouldn’t soak up water too well. Milagros’ face scrunched as she chewed her lumpia.

Alarmed and a bit ashamed, Laiza said in one syllable that she’d look for her pain medication straight away if Milagros would tell her where it was. But the old woman only scolded her with pinched eyes. Did she want the rain to end?

“Ma’am…?”

She watched Milagros chew and swallow her food as though it took a great deal of effort. After sitting for a helpless few minutes, she rose quietly, entered the kitchen, and opened a cabinet.

“Let the thing out,” Milagros said. She didn’t turn from her food.

It was the delivery robot bopping along the wall. Laiza marveled at how quiet it was, with its clean wheels and rubber exterior.

“Oh. Oh. What a pain…”

“Ma’am?”

“It’s this food. I know that Korean boy is working at the Dalumpines’ again because he makes it so spicy all the time. Here, write a note. Tell him—Arley—to come by tomorrow.”

Laiza took an extra second to parse what was said because it would be too much to ask her to repeat. Talking was tiring, she supposed.

“Uh. Okay.” She used the delivery machine’s pen to write a digital note in its feedback box. Then, she sent it down the lift, its rubber shell unimpressed by the rain.

#

When the migraines were bad, Milagros could fight through them. She could eat, bathe, clean, and herd rabbits when the pain was a six and the rain was steady. The rabbits all turned their ears to the rain when it first came, like they’d forgotten. Some were so young they’d never seen it, and they were curious and afraid, thumping explosively with a hind foot.

It was Milagros’ intention to spay and neuter every rabbit like she used to, but a little over a year ago she’d begun to forget. The rabbit rescue, which housed those taken from hoarding and abandonment situations, seemed to become that which it protested. Other neighbors had come to drive some of the rabbits to the vet and back. Milagros paid for their surgeries. It was too late for a rather large and imposing doe, however; she was full in her nest.

Still at the table, Milagros announced she was done. When Laiza moved to clear her spot, she reached back over and smacked at her hand, barely a pat-pat and most of it hitting the air.

“Not done with the food. I can’t with this pain. Going to take my pill now. Baby, sit.”

Right as she’d taken her pill, the sound of rain on the roof tapered off.

“No way…” Laiza entered the patio, stepped over the rabbits, walked out onto the balcony, and looked around. It had stopped raining. Milagros was cheerfully mumbling about how fast her medicine went to work these days as Laiza returned to the table.

“New pill, just come out,” Milagros said.

“Right. So what just happened?”

Tired eyes looked at her. The bags beneath them were stark as ever. “What I been telling you. It was raining in Georgia, but that stopped so I made it rain here.” She gestured to the chocolate she’d pulled out of the grocery bag.

Chocolate triggered her migraines, she said. Her migraines triggered the rain, she said. Not the other way around, not even if papa weatherman and mama nurse said it was that way.

Laiza ran her hand over her face. The rain smelled so wonderful outside. It had gone on for only an hour, so there wasn’t much of it standing on the ground.

“Yes, yes. I feel better. I’m tired. Hand me that one, please.” She was pointing to an agouti lop that couldn’t have been older than five weeks.

Her mind occupied, Laiza didn’t question anything when Milagros took the small rabbit from her and buried her nose behind its head. Its slit nostrils flared vigorously, in and out, the brown eyes huge.

“Smells like fresh linens. You ever smell a rabbit before? Here, smell.”

Sure as shit, the rabbit smelled great.

#

She was born ninety-five, almost ninety-six years ago racing her new lungs against the bellow of Katrina. Her mother thought she would never stop crying, that it was all going to be tears forever—especially when Katrina took half the house. When the storm ebbed, Milagros put herself to sleep, and when the world came to again, blinking the wet sand from its eyelashes, Milagros’ father saw that all their rabbits were dead from broken necks. Years later, he explained that it was the wind dashing them against the fencing of the hutch, even though the bodies were intact, even though all the organ meat was unblemished and the hides were sound.

They mourned their dead relatives. Laiza had never experienced such a devastating storm; these events were fading into the past. It’d been decades since Louisiana last felt a hurricane it couldn’t stomach. Things were just getting better all the time.

It was the small agouti lop that needed attention. Milagros said sometime in the night it had developed torticollis, its head twisted over. Arley, the boy from the restaurant, was holding it steady on the dining table, a grim expression on his face.

“I don’t know. What do you think, Laiza?” he said for the fourth time that hour.

Laiza forced a serious whistle. “It looks bad.”

“Do you think it’s suffering, baby?” Milagros said.

“I don’t know. Yeah, I mean. Yeah.”

“So we should put it to sleep.”

“I guess. I don’t know much about these things, ma’am.”

The rabbit stood still on the table, its wild eye facing the popcorn ceiling. Laiza followed its gaze. Popcorn ceilings were very stylish these days. The rabbit’s other eye burned into the table: a plain straight-cut table with none of its host’s charm, except for the knife-thin lashes where a child might’ve missed their plate.

“So you will do it,” Milagros said. “You’re the strongest one here. Go take it outside.”

“I am not gonna do that. I don’t…I don’t even know how.”

Milagros’ brow lifted and Laiza could see her eye clearly beneath the heavy lid: black eye smeared with age.

She said playfully, “You don’t know how to kill a rabbit? Laiz, you are a woman of color.”

There was once a time when all the brown girls Milagros knew were killing rabbits. Everybody had to kill their own at some point, else you starve, else you had nothing to eat but rice, which as it happened all three of them ate often and willingly. Arley piped up with a story about how his great-great grandfather’s best friend died in 1952 because of the Forgotten War. He’d been eating nothing but hares and slowly starved to death. He was a falconer, and his goshawk was such an excellent rabbit-killer that he always had them to eat, even when the West came and cut down every last tree on the peninsula. So it wasn’t fair that he had died.

“I’ll take care of it,” Arley said, and Laiza was concerned at first. He couldn’t have been older than sixteen, and she, at forty-one, felt like locking herself in Milagros’ green tiled bathroom at the thought of killing the rabbit.

“I won’t kill him,” he said softly, piling the rabbit into his arms. “I read about this last night, when Milagros woke me up to tell me. It’s caused by a bacteria. E-something.”

Laiza was surprised to hear he had stayed the night. Arley said he sometimes stayed over and no one minded, least of all his fathers, who would both someday get old and need their son to care for them. Milagros chuckled and asked Laiza if she were surprised to realize she wasn’t the most selfless person around—that others younger than she were walking hand-in-elbow with their elders.

“I’m just relieved to hear it, is all. Sometimes, it’s easy to forget…” She didn’t finish her thought. When Arley was out bringing the rabbit to his uncle’s veterinary clinic, Laiza cleaned out the litter boxes and refilled the water bottles. When he came back, the three played a card game. Arley’s winning card was something about the weather.

“Milagros, will we be getting rain again soon?” he asked.

“Yes, baby. Tonight.”

“Tonight? How do you know? The weather hasn’t said anything about rain,” Laiza said.

“Laiza,” Arley said, with a scolding look in his eye. Somehow, the soul of a lola became trapped in this teenager’s body.

“She still doesn’t believe,” Milagros said.

Laiza found herself refuting that. A virtual class on caring for old folks losing their faculties instructed her to never challenge their beliefs. But Milagros, though shaky in voice and step, had a mind clear as bells. And it had rained exactly when Milagros induced, hadn’t it?

“Listen. I used to time them all so the pain comes and goes when I am ready. Slowly, so like the clouds would roll in just as my pain came over a series of days, sometimes weeks. And of course the weatherman could see all that in the sky. But it was here, first.” She tapped her thin finger against her temple.

“You saw what she can do,” Arley insisted. Milagros had told him all about how Laiza had stood there, soundless, full of wonder at the rain come at last, like a calf just born. It was an exaggeration, Laiza thought.

Old women can be peculiar. Old women have as much personality and heart and beauty as young women. So it made sense that Milagros, most peculiar of them all, might induce, whether consciously or not, at the exact time she saw sudden rain as reported on the weather app.

But Milagros did not own a television. She owned no screen at all, save for the happy digital face of her vacuum.

#

As it was predicted, the rain came slowly over the course of two days and nights. Milagros had eaten her chocolate small bites at a time. She said, you’ll want to keep an eye on your weather app, and showed deliberately how she put the chocolate into her mouth, chewed, and washed her hands. All the while it was mirth in her eyes. And, sure as she’d said it, the weather app showed rain, and Laiza called her father, once a weatherman, to ask him his opinion.

“My opinion? On rain?” he’d said. “Uh. It’s good. And good after so many dry weeks without it. The boys are calling it a miracle. I say it’s more like a drought happened when it shouldn’t. All these fires…as a matter of fact—”

Just as Milagros said it would, the clouds came rolling, and she turned over a piece of White Rabbit candy in her jaw to distract her from it. The pain grew worse and she let it furrow a deep crease in her forehead.

She could talk through it, though. She would talk through it because conversation helped to distract her; she only learned this after Arley started coming around. He was the first to believe her and Laiza was the second.

Laiza thought that sometimes the world did feel like it was full of magic. It was alive in machinery, technology, the network. Every bottle of medicine seemed to her a hat full of white rabbits. Her mother had shown her the special robots that surgeons pilot above the most minute vessels of the human body—tiny threaders and pullers weaving a knot into a capillary.

Milagros shared a story: In 2012, when she was a child, she’d spent some time in New York, and her family there had rabbits, too. It was a beautiful autumn, and it shamed her that she was feeling terrible with a long slow migraine for days, and none of her medicines were working. To get her mind off of it, Tito Noel let her play with the baby rabbits, all black eyed, curious, and beautiful. A young fellow came around the barn that day. She said he couldn’t have been older than sixteen or seventeen. He had a terrible grin when he stomped to death three of the eight rabbits for no reason other than to whoop at Milagros’ windless screams. She began crying on the spot and tried to yell but the pain exploded for her, and she couldn’t remember what happened next—trees had crashed about the barn, the earth was soaking wet, the remaining rabbits had all taken shelter at the far back of the barn, and the teenager was dead with a broken neck.

She’d been scooped up by her father, who screamed at everyone in Vietnamese. Every time she thought of that day, she tried to remember a little more, but after eighty-nine years she only had as much as she started with.

“That was…that was Hurricane Sandy,” Laiza breathed.

“That’s what they called it. And nobody ever proved it. But I killed that boy. I know I did.”

They sat in silence. Milagros adjusted a light green bucket hat on her head. Arley had brought it to her, saying it reminded him of her vibes, and she was quite pleased to learn that “vibes” was alive again in young American lexicon.

As the storm let up, Milagros started to cook at her stove. The lights and doors of the cabinets, refrigerator, and oven all responded perfectly to her tired voice. Her pans were in the oven, of course, and her plates were all tucked into the dishwasher. Laiza smiled. Her own father was Chinese and her mother was from the Philippines; she knew in her blood where the kitchenware ought to go.

Sinigang was soon boiling away, and Laiza knew what it was going to be because she had been the one to buy the ingredients. Milagros began to hum as she split the eggplant and Laiza cut the ginger. Later, when Arley came over, they ate the soup and he told them all about his friends. The afternoon shadows were stretching long over the bayou when Laiza got to asking questions.

 “How did you first come to know about your…powers?” The old woman had been kicked into overdrive at this, insisting in more words that it was weakness, a terrible, cruel curse that tied her pain to the storms. There was not much discussed about the learning. Maybe she figured it out during Sandy. Maybe she always instinctively knew, like a rabbit knows that it’s prey.

“What’s the effect radius? Do you know?”

“Ask me something else.”

“How long does it typically take—”

“Something else, please.”

Laiza thought for a second. “Do you have any family?”

Arley was nodding along as though he knew the story already. There was a wife, Margot, who passed ten years ago, and a daughter who died when she was forty. They welcomed the easy-access technology early on, so Milagros and Margot spent all of their fifty-plus years together in a house that self-mended, eating food that self-delivered, among orchids that machines reminded them to water. It was good, the array of machines. Laiza hadn’t ever before seen a cane like Milagros’ and now she was seeing them everywhere. If her knees ever got bad enough, she might get one herself.

Milagros’ family always kept rabbits.

“The range. I will say…all the Southeast. And I know, too, when and where it’s going to rain. If it hurts here, near my right ear. I just know it’s raining in North Carolina.”

She moved to get up but something twinged in her back and the cane wrapped itself around her hip, keeping her up. Laiza was most of that effort.

“It’s bad to get old,” Milagros joked.

“You’re not old,” Arley said, taking her by the elbow. She smiled at him.

“Ninety-six has never been so young. Honestly, it gets younger every year.”

Milagros smiled sadly. “No, no. Not for me. It’s all in my bones now. The trauma of being scared so long. Being butted up against Texas so long. Now for you,” she looked Laiza hard in the eyes, “when you’re ninety-six, you’ll be fit and young as ever. And you’ll have people who care about you, and you about them. Like I do.”

#

Milagros had said last week that the big rain was coming. She was firm in her talk, slow and mysterious. She’d been fighting it off a long while, letting the little rains come and soak the soil through. That way there wouldn’t be any flooding with the big rain. The Mississippi would swell, pushing silt up onto the rocks. It wouldn’t take anything back down with it; it hadn’t been hungry that way in a long time.

Arley had been over practically every day. His fathers, too, stayed a night to help. As strong as she was against the pain, this big rain was putting Milagros to bed earlier and earlier every night. Dishes were piled, washed by hand, and stacked in a mobile machine in need of repairs. It was clear its purpose was to place the heavy dishes into the cabinets. Laiza had shaken her head; they were meant to go in the dishwasher.

Some time ago, Arley brought back that wry-neck agouti rabbit, its head no more straight than the day it left for the vet. It had medicine now, which, as Laiza understood, was supposed to maybe shake the head a bit loose from that position. It sat quietly, at times tiger-crawling across the patio to sniff the other rabbits.

Milagros lamented their state; rescues they were, many with crusty eyes and teeth far too long. Now they’d be needing rescuing again, only this time it was her fault they’d spun out of control, with GI stasis killing one before she could notice. Arley and his family promised to find them all happy homes.

It’s never a good thing to look a bent-head rabbit in the eyes for too long, Laiza thought. The agouti lop stared dazedly at the ceiling and the floor. What did its world look like? Was there sense to it? Could the brain make a puzzle of those pieces?

With Milagros dozing in her room, Laiza found herself petting the lop. Her hand had to travel a screwy path from its nose over its wrong way head and to the perfect tail. She thought to herself what most people ponder in their nervous states: that life was beautiful, a miracle. As was the exit.

The next day, Laiza came over like usual, only Milagros didn’t answer the door. She let herself in with the key under the mat. It was quiet, save for the rabbits, which had all gotten in the house—or they were let in, with the patio door shut behind them.

Some had tipped over the garbage bin and were chasing each other for chocolate wrappers. The green bucket hat was on the floor, with several rabbits attempting to hide beneath it. Outside, something made the earth seem like it was whistling.

On the table, there was a note:

Arley & Laiza,

Not sure about this next one. You’ll be okay, though. Go to New Orleans for a bit—never been a flood it couldn’t handle. Not in fifty years. I’m not scared anymore. I love you.

“Ma’am?” Laiza called.

Then, the sky shattered outside and let out all the rain that would ever come. All the rabbits scrambled to get beneath something, their hind legs thumping as the thunder pealed directly overhead. The huge white bucks stormed the couch, and the smaller ones took to the green bucket hat. All except for the agouti lop. It stood calmly in the center of the floor. Its twisted head snapped back into place.