"White Rabbits" (1941)

Leonora Carrington is better known as a Surrealist painter but she also wrote stories and novels. She was born in Britain in 1917, tossed around by European political currents and her own rebellious behavior, and finally landed in Mexico in the early '40s. This very short gem from The Weird speaks to the itinerant traveling lifestyle, told first-person by someone who has just arrived in New York City, living at "40 Pest Street" across the way from an odd house. "This is not the way I had imagined New York," she writes in dry understatement. The narrator is never specified by gender but feels like the voice and life of a woman. Her view of New York is a little unusual but has some of the atmosphere of Charles Addams or Edgar Allan Poe, taking careful note of the light, which is dim and hazy. She can see into the house across the way through the living room window but no one ever seems to be at home. "I finally took to undressing quite freely before my open window and doing my breathing exercises optimistically in the thick Pest Street air." After some time she sees a woman at the other house on the balcony, who calls to her, "Do you happen to have any bad meat over there that you don't need?" The story creates mounting unease by the paragraph, with swift strokes. Out of curiosity, the narrator buys "a large lump of meat" and sets it out to rot a few days. There may be some exaggeration about the smell but the story moves quickly, as next the narrator is seen bearing the reeking prize across the way. Now the story hits its stride. Everything is turned upside down and insane and weird and ghostly inside the house, whose entrance, to start, is difficult to find. "It turned out to be hidden under a cascade of something, giving the impression that nobody had been either in or out of this house in years." I particularly love that "hidden under a cascade of something." Carrington writes vividly but she also knows where to apply the eraser and rub out details. The white rabbits, to get to that detail (stars of Lewis Carroll and Jefferson Airplane before and after), are shiny white and hopping about like bunnies, but they are also carnivores, which immediately sets us off balance. The bad meat is for them; they are not just carnivores but carrion-eaters, like vultures. Any immediate danger in this story is easily escaped, but that offers little solace in this terrifying universe. We see the rabbits, we learn more about the strange occupants of the house—more than we want to know. The story takes comforting things like bunny rabbits and sparkling textures and casually makes them hideously wrong.

The Weird, ed. Ann and Jeff VanderMeer
Story not available online.