• Once again I am stuck in this padded room and in this damn vest. My little room is only eight feet from wall to wall and floor to ceiling, but you really only get seven feet when you add the thick white pads to the walls, floor, and ceiling. The pads are just thick enough to stop the crazies from hurting themselves but it’s not nearly soft enough to be comfortable. I hate not being able to move with this vest on, I hate it. I start growling as I thrash around trying to rip the vest. I give up, once again, when my breaths come in hard pats.

    A happy, carefree voice calls from behind me, “What ya got there?” I spin around in shock and there, in my little cell is my old friend Mr. Bunny. He looks just like the last time I seen him. He is a grey bunny with a white belly, when he stands up straight he is about the size of a ten year old boy. His little fluffy tail twitches as he looks at me lying on the floor.

    “Mr. Bunny.” I yell in joy. His long ears stand a little taller on the top of his head as he gives me a big grin, showing off his set of straight white human teeth.

    “What ya doing down there?” Mr. Bunny asks, making the word doing into three syllables, which makes me giggle like the kid I was when we first met.

    The giggles die down and I let out a sigh. “I hit one of those damn power hungry orderlies. So they slapped on this vest and threw in the white room.” I say moving my head around as if it was my hand to present the surroundings.

    Mr. Bunny looks at the walls with a lot more interest than the off-white pad deserves; maybe he was counting the cloth covered buttons that make the walls look like a piece of riveted metal. “Why don’t ya just leave?”

    “You don’t think I would have if I could?” I ask angrily. Then I let out a deep breath, I don’t want this visit to go bad and he has never been here before. He doesn’t know about this place. “I can’t get out of this vest and if I could, all the doors are locked. Those ******** orderlies are the only ones with the keys.”

    “Weren’t you trapped once before? Didn’t I help you back then?” He asks with his happy face, but his eyes are cold. I have seen Mr. Bunny’s eyes in my face too.

    He is right.

    I was kid back then. Playing a Gameboy I had traded an older boy a magazine with nude women in it I had found on the side of the road for. My older brother Billy was reading a book quietly in the cover of the rust stained and moldy room of our trailer. I had just died again in my game when I stomped my foot and said “Darn.”

    There was the sound of a bottle hitting a table from the living-room and the bellow of, “What the ******** was that?” I froze and I knew the terror in my brother’s face was reflected on mine. Billy flinched as the pounding steps of our father sounded, coming closer.

    Well he wasn’t our father, our mother didn’t even know who our fathers were, but he was as close as we would ever have. Once I asked my mother why we didn’t know our fathers, upon overhearing this Bod said it was because she was a ******** whore. I was confused; I thought a whore was someone you never wanted to come across, like a monster in a story. If she was a whore why did Bod say with her? It probably had something to do with the odd thumping sounds and moans I heard from their room every night.

    The door flew open and bounced off the wall. Bod stood in the doorway red faced and drunk. In two strides he was in front of me and had my Gameboy in his hand. He threw it at the wall; it almost hit Billy in the head before he ducked and it exploded against the fake wood panels covering the walls. He clearly hadn’t see Billy there until the Gameboy had died. “Get the ******** out.” He screamed at Billy. My brother left the room with is book, but I saw his shoulders sag in relief as went out the door.

    Bob turned on me, “Why the hell are you making so much noise?”

    “I…….” That is all I got out because he backhanded so hard a hit the wall.

    “Don’t ******** talk back to me, you little s**t.” He screamed with red-shot eyes and spit flying out of his mouth.

    The side of my face hurt, my lip stung, and there was a warm trail of blood running down my chin. I ran from him. I grabbed the door frame to help me hook around and headed towards the living-room. Mom stared at the TV, there was a bunny getting the best of a hunter on it. “Momma,” I wailed my voice thick with pleading. But her eyes only flicked to me for a second before returning to the TV and she turned the volume up.

    I stood shocked that she would not care that her baby was standing there bleeding from her boyfriend’s hands. I felt a strong hand grab my arm and pull me back down the hall. It hurt my injured shoulder, a week before Bob had pulled me out of my bed with such force that he pulled my arm out of the socket. When he calmed down, Bob pushed the arm back in.

    That night, as my brother listened to a Walkman that he had stolen from a classmate, I cried in my bed. My lip had stopped bleeding but one of my eyes was swollen shut. “Why are ya crying little guy?” I opened my good eye and there by my bed stood Mr. Bunny. He smiled sadly at me and said, “Hi, my name is Bunny and what is yours?”

    “John.” I sniveled out.

    “Why are you crying, John?”

    His voice was so calm and caring that the answer poured out of me. “Why do they all hate me?”

    Mr. Bunny stood with his head cocked as if listening. I quieted my tears long enough to hear the odd thumping and moaning sounds coming from Bob and Mom’s room. “They don’t hate you. They just want.” Mr. Bunny said softly.

    “Want what?”

    Mr. Bunny looked down at me with those cold eyes and said, “Your brother wants you to be the one Bob goes after, so it’s not him that gets it. Your mother wants to ignore what Bob does to her boys. Bob wants to stay home all day and drink instead of working to support your mother and her kids.” He gave me a wicked grin and said, “You, John, can give them what they want.”

    Later, once the trailer was silent, I got out of bed and went to the kitchen. With my new buddy Mr. Bunny beside me I went to my brother’s bed, then mom and bob’s, and gave them what they wanted. Now my brother never has to deal with Bob. My mother is able to ignore everything. And Bob never has to work again.

    I look at my old friend and say, “Yes, you have always been there for me. Mr. Bunny.”
    He smiles at me and says, “Ya know the problem with that vest is that you can’t move your arms. But it was tied to ya while your arms were in the right place. If one of your arms was to pop out,” Mr. Bunny put extra emphasis on those last two words, “ya could use the other arm to remove that pesky vest.” Mr. Bunny grins down at me. “Then you could wait for one of those orderlies to open the door and just give ya those keys.”

    I smile at him and start to push and pull. I spend the next hour or so contorting and banging my arm against the padded walls. Finally there is a sharp pain in my shoulder and a loud pop. With the arm limp the vest comes off easily and it takes me much less time to put the arm back into its socket. Breathing hard I smile at him and lean on the wall by the door. I am just waiting with my old friend Mr. Bunny.

    End.