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Nine
Bunny finished the rest of her shift in a daze, playing the strange events over and over in her mind. After driving Morticia home from work, she wondered just how hard it was going to be to put souls into people.
She glanced down at her mom’s necklace, looking at the way it changed colors in the dappled morning light filtering through the tree outside of her living room window. Rainbow-hued ribbons ran through the stone and might have just been a pretty feature if Bunny hadn’t known they had a deeper meaning. Thousands of souls, each waiting to get their start in the world. It was an incredible and immense responsibility, and one that she hoped she was ready for.
But she’d already done it once. Her brain circled her back to Fiona in the apartment building hallway, glowing. White light that had turned a gorgeous rose pink. Had that been a soul? The more Bunny thought about it, the more she thought it was. Which made her think of the baby in the ER—the one who had lost its parents. She’d seen her mom with the same pink glow as Fiona, hadn’t she? That was, until the baby was born. Did the white glow mean that a woman was ready to receive a soul?
Damn, she needed a good strong coffee.
Figuring out how to put the souls in was one thing. At least she only had six ensoulments to carry out, right? That’s the number she’d seen on the cooler’s counter. Six wasn’t such a bad number and assigning a name to the task—ensoulment—helped her feel more in control of the situation. She shed her clothes in her walk-through closet and slipped into her cozy bathroom, turning the shower spigots until vapor was steaming up the soothing sea-green tiles. The hot water scalded her a little at first, making her hop habitually from foot to foot until her body adjusted. But after that, the steady stream felt wonderful. Her muscles ached, thanks to her not being forty anymore and the fact her job was physically demanding.
As she let her massaging showerhead work out the kinks in her neck and shoulders, Bunny did some hardcore brainstorming. Where was the best place to quickly put six souls where they needed to be? A maternity ward was the most obvious answer, but she quickly discounted it as the least effective. Women in maternity wards were usually there to give birth already, so she wasn’t likely to find willing victims—er, vessels—there.
A light bulb went off in her head as she was drying herself. Her OB-GYN office! Of course there would be women there who were seeking referrals for fertility treatments or having check-ups before trying to conceive. Wouldn’t there? Bunny had only ever gone there for her Pap smears, but she was sure her medical-based reasoning couldn’t fail her. It hurt her own soul a little to pull on jeggings and an oversized leopard-print sweater instead of her pajamas but getting the chance to wear her brand-new leather-look Sketchers soothed her somewhat.
Round one, she said to herself, pulling her hair into a high ponytail as she grabbed her keys and headed out.
* * *
She realizeda tad too late that her OB-GYN office was not the optimal place to catch women who were hoping to get pregnant. Not because there weren’t any there, but because she didn’t know if her patience extended to listening to people after having worked a full night shift and visiting the lobby of the universe. The waiting room was full of woman from all walks of life, and Bunny quickly plopped herself down on a seat between two others before she could lose her nerve and straight-up walk out.
Six souls. Six. That was all.
A little girl who looked to be about three was doing her best opera singer impersonation in the corner, wailing at the top of her lungs while her mother tiredly flipped through an ancient copy of Vogue. Another mother was cleaning off her blouse with wet wipes after her now sleeping newborn had upchucked sour milk all over her.
Bunny kept her dark sunglasses on, so that she could people watch without too much judgement. She had her eyes honed in on the door to observe the comings and goings, her right leg crossed over her left knee with her foot bouncing impatiently as she once more entertained the thought that this might not have been the best place to come after all.
“Why’re you wearing your sunglasses?” a small voice to her right asked. She turned to find the little girl had stopped her singing and decided she might get more attention if she commanded it directly. “We’re inside. My mommy says that hats and sunglasses are for outside only.”
“Because I’m hungover,” Bunny replied instantly without a hitch. “Your mommy needs you.”
Having kids had never really popped up on Bunny’s radar. She’d always known she wanted to be in Atlanta and not Mosswood and had decided from an early age that being a nurse was just about the coolest thing she could think of doing with her life. Studying hard in college hadn’t left much time for dating, and the men she’d met after graduating hadn’t been able to cope with the fact that her job always came first. So having a family had been all but shuffled to the back of her deck. It was a mark of her inexperience with kids that she thought for one second her attempt at misdirection would make the kid leave her alone.
“What’s that mean?”
“Uh—sick. Yeah. I’m sick. And very tired. So I’m wearing these to rest my eyes a bit. Okay?”
“Callie,” the woman’s mother called then, looking up from her magazine long enough to rein in her daughter. “Come here, please.” The subtext was ‘because I don’t want you near the drunk woman’. Bunny smirked, directing her gaze back to her phone, where her search results had populated.
Yin and yang. Light and dark. Life and death. If Death was death… did that mean she was Life?
“They’re adorable, aren’t they?”
The soft, kind voice pulled Bunny back from the precipice before she could fall into the void by clicking on a search result for reincarnation.
“Absolutely,” she smiled, politely tucking her cell back in her purse.
The woman, who was tall and thin and looked like the poster girl for healthy women in their forties, said, “Today’s the day my doctor tells me that everything we’ve tried has failed and my last option is IVF.”
Well, fuck.
“Oh,” Bunny fumbled, not really sure where to go with the conversation from there. “I’m… sorry.”
“It’s fine. I’m fine,” the lady said, shrugging off something that obviously had the potential to make her rather emotional. “It’s just hard, you know? You know what I mean. No one plans to end up forty-three and alone. Just…” She made a ‘poofing’ gesture with her hands, which Bunny could only assume was meant to relate the way her life was going. But hey—the woman assumed she was only in her forties. Silver lining.
“The older I get, the more I come to realize that there’s no such thing as a plan,” was all Bunny had to offer in return, stretching her legs out in front of her.
The woman nodded emphatically. “See? You feel me. It’s been a long, hard-ass road as it is, and then it’s like God feels He needs to kick you while you’re down.”
