Silky. Precious. That’s how Sean’s bunny suit felt against his skin. The satiny inside against his bare nipples was a private thrill, transmitting micro-shivers of subcutaneous pleasure throughout his chest. If there were a tool that measured physical pleasure, its graph readings would be displayed in light pink.

Just like the bunny suit. And because he insisted on going shirtless—better ventilation that way—Sean needed to watch in the mirror as he zipped himself into his Oryctolagus cuniculus state of being. Did people even know that the term “rabbit” wasn’t that old? If you were going to be a rabbit, you needed to know something about rabbits. You had to do your homework. Until the 18^th century, coneys hopped around New York; they hopped around anywhere they could forage and burrow. “Coney” came from French—conil, a long-eared mammal with powerful hind legs. Or it came from Dutch—konijn. Dutch settlers saw a profusion of the things knocking about on the peninsula and called it Konijn Island, a slender span of earth whose sovereign entity was the wild rabbit.

Rabbits were not hares. Anyone should know that. The two were not interchangeable. Most people knew that hares were bigger, but hares didn’t burrow—they nested. Hares were born precocial—fully furred with eyes open—straight out of the womb. They were practically ready to mate. Rabbits, in contrast, were born naked and blind. To Sean, this was cute. Something blind and naked needed protection. It needed love. It needed to be the color of a fairy tale.

He’d been miffed after seeing the tabloid headline: Is Sean Penn A Furry? No, he wasn’t interested in anthropomorphism. And he wasn’t at all interested in the urban implication: that he participated in sexual encounters while portraying a twitching animal. If anything, Sean was more rabbit—or coney, or bunny—than his costumed counterparts. Yes, he was furry-adjacent, but the comparison ended there. He’d nothing against the furry community, it was just that he didn’t consider himself a part. He was a lone rabbit. A stag in the wilderness. Sean was the kind of rabbit who would willingly sit cross-legged for hours on a remote plateau, measuring out time until his coral blush ears received a proper vibration.

Anyway, he was hungry. There was fresh arugula in the fridge and mustard greens from the night before. Sean laid into the greenery with a refined zest. What Coney Island must’ve been like before humans! It was true, however, that the island hadn’t gone unnamed before the Dutch. The Konoh Nation was present when white settlers appeared. The name “Konoh” had reportedly been corrupted into “Coney,” but this was expansionist apocrypha. Konoh meant bear, not rabbit.

Sean smiled to himself at his knowledge. Why didn’t people know anything? There were so many lonely people out there, and it was probably because they’d missed out on deciding to know something. If you knew something about joists and trusses, you knew about construction, which meant that you could meet and fall in love with a construction worker. This seemed clear. If you knew how many flats were in a G-flat minor scale, you might meet a concert pianist, but pianists were tricky. They obsessed over practice and rarely engaged in debate on endive versus radicchio.

To Sean, being a rabbit meant entering a metaphysical realm. At first he’d been doubtful leaving home fully uniformed—his bunny suit wasn’t a costume—but when he’d made it through Whole Foods without the least bit of attention, Sean knew he’d chosen correctly. Existence and identity, consciousness and time—these could all be plumbed from the inside of synthetic rabbit skin. There was no subterfuge, no hostile bid for the accumulation of power. Being a rabbit meant living at the edge of one’s senses, alert to the world while adapting one’s life to nature rather than the other way around.

In profile, his tummy was sticking out. Even after all that lettuce. Mirrors spoke truth, even if it was unforgiving, and Sean sucked his in as he guided the zipper over his bellybutton. He was going to the park and would sit on a bench. This was an uncluttered thing to do. No objective other than to feel what it was like to be a rabbit in repose. The collateral effect of being magnetic to children was offset by the wary shepherding of their parents—Sean interpreted this as cosmic balance. Everybody should be a rabbit. They didn’t talk much. Their noses were energy receptors in counsel with the universe. Rabbits of the past ruled whole islands until human interference disrupted their ancient ways. Sean’s friend Sierra—actor, yogi, and self-proclaimed witch—had once told him that the rabbit as spirit animal emphasized “intuition and transformation.” Sean had laughed out loud in jubilant affirmation. That last word—that was it. That one hit home.

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Laton Carter’s writing appears in The Boiler, Necessary Fiction, and The Swannanoa Review.