Phil was relieved when professor Bains ended class early.  He quickly slid into the bathroom, selecting the handicap stall on the end.  Although the bottom foot or so exposed his legs and virtually all sounds emitted could be heard throughout the bathroom and beyond, Phil considered that stall a sanctuary.  He had every inch of graffitti memorized.  Sometimes he would just sit.  Just sit and read.  Away from the conversations that both delighted and tortured him.

Phil graduated from high school one year early – not early enough to be the subject of awe, but just early enough to not get most dirty jokes at Freshman parties.  He felt like the belly-button lint of his generation.  And so he nestled into this belly-button of a town and spent the last three years undoing the extra-credit he did in high school.  Philip was now a year behind with no end in sight.

He took this opportunity to retrace the fading inscriptions on his inner thighs.  In black ink they read “self is an illusion” and “precisely ambiguous” where no one could ever see; the only two truths he had learned from college thus far.     

Catching Houdini the Rabbit was anti-climactic.  Martha saw him eating some Cherios on the kitchen floor one morning and decided to start a conversation.

“So… nice weather, huh?” she said in her most nonthreatening voice.

“My mom can smell storms coming an hour away… I bet you can smell ‘em, what, two hours away?”

Houdini looked up from his meal and wiggled his nose.

“Wow, four whole hours in advance?!  You should work for the weather channel.”

They went on to discuss politics and the pros and cons of marshmellows.  Then Martha picked him up and put him in a box without a struggle.  Now it was time to round up the gang.

She got out her seasoned violin from its case and played a familiar snippet from Robin Hood the musical that had somehow become the cattle call for Martha’s posse of third-graders.  All the walls inside the apartment building were paper-thin and at times seemed to have an amplifying effect on various instruments and especially “personal” sounds.  The four exterior walls, in contrast, were dungeon-thick – giving the occupants the feeling of living in the improvized honey-comb of a swarm of bees who were forced to settle in a man-made structure.  It was determined years prior that such an unfortunate acoustic situation would allow for only one resident musician.  For about a week the hive buzzed with impromptu auditions.  Martha won and so the cry of her violin now wrang out unimpeded.

Darwin answered first.  He ran through the front door and was immediately blinded by the orange sunset flooding in through the window, obviously suffering from a post-nap hang-over.  A wave, a “Hey” and a plop on the living room chair.

Roger was next.  He strutted in with a look of forced indifference, brandishing a protuberant bulge in his right pocket.

“Hi Roger.  Watcha got there?”

“Oh…just a walky-talky,” he said, struggling to take it out with some degree of proficeincy.

“That’s cool.  Hey, when you talk to people with that they can say ‘Roger that Roger’” Martha observed.

“I already know that” Roger informed her.

Martha had baby-sat the three since they were toddlers.  She didn’t really need the five-dollars-an-hour anymore.  She continued spending time with them because they were, quite simply, cool.  At least she recognized the possibility for genuine coolness, an attribute that she believed comes naturally at birth and is systematically rooted out of us all.  Her sacred duty was to preserve this essence, or at least get a better understanding of how it is destroyed.

Ashok was always last.  Martha may very well have lost interest in the bunch if it weren’t for this most peculiar boy.   

“Hello.  My name is Houdini.  Why are you trying to kill me?” read the note Martha found taped to the front door.  It couldn’t have been written by Philip, she thought.  No matter how hard he tried he couldn’t have faked such nice cursive.

It wasn’t so much nice handwriting as technically perfect.  There was no style to it, every cross and dot was exactly half-way between the base and top of the tall letters. 

Her acute observation of these details made Martha wonder if she was watching too much CSI lately.  Without this weekly ritual, however,  she would never find a conversationless hour in the same room as her mother who was enthralled by the show.  During the commercials she would just watch her mother’s expressionless face that wasn’t without a sort of mascara beauty.

Yes, it was definitely written by a child in the building, trying to convince them that his or her pet rabbit, who had recently been terrorizing their residence, was an intelligent being (with excellent penmanship) who deserved a better fate than extermination.

They had never planned on killing the thing.  But just in case, Martha decided it was up to her to rescue Houdini. 

Philip tied the final chord of the rabbit trap to his bed-post. Being the man of the house, all matters of extermination fell on him. He knew the chances of this twelve-part Rube Goldberg machine actually capturing the thing were slim but he didn’t care. His mom and sister’s incessant griping had finally gotten to him and, although doomed to failure, he knew his busyness would at least calm the two.

He learned from many years of working in the grocery store owned by his grandpa on the bottom floor of their building, that the appearance of busyness is more valuable than actual results. Besides, it was most likely this animal was the pet of a child in the building who, after over-hearing Mom’s furious anti-rabbitical rantings, decided against putting up a “Lost Rabbit” poster.

Gazing with pride on his creation, Philip considered adding Engineering as a third minor to his ever-expanding degree at Winsmere College. He was currently a Philosophy Major with a double-minor in English Literature and Psychology and had acquired twelve credits in the past three years.

The rabbit’s entry into the kitchen would tug a chord which would pull a helium balloon out from under a baby chair that hadn’t been used since his sister was a toddler – a constant reminder that their mom had not yet given up on remarrying and having more rabbit-catchers. The balloon would pop on a tack taped to the ceiling, rendering the chord resistance-less and thus letting the wound-up race car toy on the other end peel out across the floor. After nine more triggered reactions involving eggs, dominoes, a pair of spectacles, sunlight, hairspray, a ten pound lifting weight, velcro, and a gas lighter, the victim would be quite trapped under a tupperware container.

Of course what actually happened was the rabbit, upon hearing the balloon pop, raced out of the room just in time to send Philip’s mom screaming into the kitchen where she was met by two flying eggs that hit her stomach and splattered all over her bare feet.

He didn’t need to see her yolkey feet to know what had happened. It looked like the yolks of her eyes had cracked. It was a face she only gave to him. After years of yelling to no avail, Maggy Edith-Dodger would now let her helplessness build up tears in her eyes and masterfully wield the cutting blade of guilt.

To be continued…

Martha caught a long glimpse of the rabbit that had been menacing their apartment complex for the passed several weeks and let out a sigh of frustration. She was sick of her brother’s constant hypothesizing as to the significance of the white rabbit as a symbol. It was insignificant, she had tried to convince him.

But for something as insignificant as a rabbit, it sure was making life hard on the third floor of Red Butte Building 27. It had an unhampered appetite for wallpaper.

“The property value of this place has gone down enough since they made the Harper Place into a Looney Bin. The last thing we need is holy walls.” Mom was known to remind them regularly.

Bob Harper had been a strange character for as long as they had known him before his death several years ago. He had no wife or kids and rarely left his front door. If he did come out to check the mail or smoke a cigarette he always wore a different get-up. These rare appearances did not seem that of someone who was afraid of the outside world at all but more like performances. He often spoke with a fake accent and would spend several hours introducing himself to passersby as a different character, only to vanish again for several more months.

The house had seemed to sag with the weight of over-grown weeds. It now looked like a bum on whom someone took pity and gave a gentlemanly makeover; grinning with a kind of awkward clean.

Mister Harper left all of his money to a private organization that provides counseling and sanctuary to the mentally disturbed. The white-coats came in three waves; first the landscapers, then the doctors, then the patients.

Mom failed to see the irony in a building being refurbished lowering the property value of the local establishments. All she saw were more Bob Harpers and it made her feel dirty.

To be continued…