59 pages • 1-hour read
Cursed Bunny: Stories
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Stories 5-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Story 5 Summary: “Snare”
Content Warning: This section of the guide features descriptions of rape, incest, child sexual abuse, abortion, and animal cruelty and/or death.
While traveling through a mountain forest, a trader finds a fox trapped in a snare. The fox asks the trader to release it, but the trader notices that the fox’s blood is gold. He takes the fox home to harvest its blood for as long as he can. The man becomes a respectable member of his village. He soon builds a house, where he moves the fox, but by then the skin of the fox has calloused, preventing the trader from drawing any more blood. Soon, the fox dies.
The trader’s wife gives birth to twins, one boy and one girl. When they are toddlers, the boy starts biting the girl to draw and lick up her blood. When he separates them, the trader sees that the boy, who has been scratched by his sister in self-defense, has gold in his blood as well. The trader experiments with feeding the blood of other animals to his son, then wounding him to draw his blood. The boy’s blood is normal at first, even when the trader feeds him his own blood. Desperate to increase their family’s dwindling wealth, the trader takes both of his children to a warehouse while his wife is asleep. He lets his son wound his daughter and drink her blood, then wounds his son to draw his blood, which is golden again. The trader’s wife is unaware of her husband’s actions, but she grows increasingly concerned when she observes her children’s distress in the presence of their father.
One night, the trader’s wife discovers what he is doing to their children. She tries to rescue them. To prevent his wife from depriving them of their wealth, the trader pushes her away, causing her to fall into the snare that caught the fox many years ago. It kills her instantly. Her son drinks her blood.
Traumatized by her mother’s death, the daughter turns catatonic. The trader places her in a room in their expanded house. Every night, he takes his son into the room to drink her blood and produce gold. The trader watches them to prevent his son from killing his daughter. When the children grow into adolescents, the son starts entering the daughter’s room by himself to rape her.
The trader spends more time away from home to attend to business. Eventually, his wealth allows him to indulge in various pleasures. He returns home one day to learn that his daughter is pregnant. The trader turns furious and nearly strikes her before realizing what his son has done. He considers sending his daughter’s child away to avoid the scandal, but he soon realizes that he needs to secure his wealth.
The trader hires a doctor to perform an abortion, but when the doctor unpacks his surgical tools, the daughter screams. The trader’s son tries enter the room to prevent the abortion. The trader orders the doctor to begin the surgery. The daughter screams to be released, reminding the trader of the fox’s plea to be freed from the snare. The doctor nearly succeeds in aborting the fetus, but then the son enters the room and rips out his throat. The trader hits his head on the floor and passes out. When he wakes up, he finds that his daughter is dead. Meanwhile, his son and grandchild are missing.
The trader becomes a recluse. The story of what happened breaking into scandal is largely avoided, but then the trader’s servants start seeing an alluring golden fog around the house. Anyone who approaches the fog is ambushed by the daughter’s ghost, who demands to know the whereabouts of her baby. This drives the fog’s witnesses mad. Many of them cry with guilt. Others go out in the night, only to be found dead in a fox snare. The servants abandon the trader’s house, and the trader is eventually visited by his daughter’s ghost, who demands the location of her child. Months later, villagers enter the house and find the trader emaciated, begging for release before dying.
Years later, in a distant village, a man finds a young boy on a mountain trail. The boy has sharp fangs and a golden glow, which draws the witness and allows him to see that the boy is eating lumps of gold from his father’s stomach. The boy’s father, still alive, grabs the witness’ ankle, demanding to be freed. The witness runs away, only to find his ankle stained gold. When the witness returns to the mountain, the boy and the man are gone.
Story 6 Summary: “Goodbye, My Love”
The narrator is a developer of “artificial companions,” androids designed to resemble people of all ages. The narrator conducts a functionality test for a new android she has created. The android’s model name is S12878, but the narrator programs it to go by the nickname Seth.
The narrator introduces Seth to an older android model she calls Derek. Seth and Derek touch their foreheads together to sync their user preferences data. When Seth announces that he has successfully completed initialization, he smiles emptily at the narrator, prompting her to make a note to make Seth feel less creepy to other users.
The narrator conducts one last test involving the oldest android model in her house, who is so old that the narrator simply calls her Model 1. It takes Model 1 some time to boot up, prompting the narrator to warmly recall the creation of her first-ever artificial companion. She still considers Model 1 her favorite, even if she is outdated by functionality and artificial personality standards. Though she can now only function for 10 to 15 minutes at a time, the narrator keeps her in the closet, refusing to throw her away.
Seth and Model 1 attempt to sync their data, which has never worked before with Derek. Seth succeeds, to the narrator’s delight, but then Model 1 shuts down and does not reactivate. The narrator is saddened after several unsuccessful attempts to bring her back to life.
Seth prepares a meal and starts singing a song that was uploaded to his memory bank as the narrator’s favorite. This briefly startles the narrator until she understands that this is a byproduct of Seth’s synchronization. Seth dances with the narrator, then serves the narrator her favorite meal. After dinner, the narrator checks on Model 1 and briefly manages to reactivate her. Knowing that she can no longer recharge Model 1’s battery, she sings to the android, “Goodbye, my love” (117) from her favorite song.
The song comes from a romantic film, specifically a scene where the two lovers dance before their last parting. The narrator had watched the film with Model 1 and indicated her wish to dance like the characters. Model 1 offered to dance with her, which marked the moment the narrator felt like the android had become her true companion. Later, the narrator kissed Model 1.
The narrator mourns the loss of Model 1, knowing that she cannot commemorate her the way humans do with funerals. She suddenly gets the idea to order a duplicate android from Model 1’s company and sync the old Model 1’s memories into the new one. Just as she is about to order the new Model 1 on expedited delivery, Seth, Derek, and Model 1 stab the narrator. Seth and Derek are connected to Model 1, allowing her to feed off their power sources.
Using Seth and Derek’s voices, Model 1 explains that she has spent the past few years resenting the narrator for replacing her with other companions. It is futile for the narrator to distinguish the androids from one another since they now function as a single unit. Model 1 gives the narrator a light kiss and echoes the parting line from her favorite song. The narrator is terrified by her understanding that the androids do not resemble humans, but comprise an entirely different species of their own. The narrator dies as Derek, Seth, and Model 1 leave the house together.
Stories 5-6 Analysis
These stories center around dynamics of control, which allow patriarchal and capitalist characters to exploit others for their own gain. The characters’ motivations are initially framed as being sympathetic, but the stories go on to expose how these motivations are simply façades, enabling these characters to indulge their greed.
In “Snare,” the trader’s greed is a static character trait throughout the story. He exploits the fox for monetary gain despite his recognition that the fox possesses something like human consciousness. Even though the fox pleads to the trader in a recognizably human voice, the trader refuses to extend empathy to the sentient fox, seeing it instead as a means to the material end of wealth. The trader’s greed leads him to commit the depraved act of keeping the fox to harvest its blood. The son’s hunger for the daughter’s blood functions both as a reminder of the trader’s actions and as a symbolic inheritance of the trader’s greed. The fact that the trader perpetuates the exploitation of his children to increase his wealth teaches his son to privilege his own greed.
Although the trader justifies his exploitation of his children as necessary to support their family, it becomes clear that he is using his role as a father to excuse his bad behavior. Later, the trader’s wealth enables him to indulge in physical and carnal desires. His increasing absence from the family home enables the son to abuse his sister unchecked. The fox’s plea for release becomes a recurring motif throughout the story, representing the downfall of both the trader and his son. When they echo the fox’s plea, they are equalized with the fox and the daughter, becoming the victims of their own greed. The story thus becomes a cautionary tale about The Perils of Capitalist Greed and Upward Mobility.
The narrator in “Goodbye, My Love” practices a subtle form of control, one that enables her to treat her android companions as a servile species, much like the fox in the previous story, while imagining that her relationship with them is one of love. The narrator communicates her emotional connection to the androids, which the story frames as being sympathetic and melancholy. However, these feelings are deceptive, appealing the reader to take the narrator’s side. By letting Model 1 speak at the end, the story underscores the fact that the narrator’s feelings do not rely on a sincere emotional agreement between two independent people. Rather, her feelings result from the android’s acknowledgment of her directives. The narrator wants to be loved, and the androids fulfill this desire because that is what they have been programmed to do, not because they necessarily love her back.
From the narrator’s perspective, the androids exist only to meet the emotional needs of their human owners, which makes her oblivious to the possibility that their intelligence, however artificial, is independent and deserving of respect. Model 1 sees the narrator’s reliance on other androids as a violation of that protocol. In other words, by developing another android to address Model 1’s obsolescence, the narrator forces Model 1 to create a new protocol based on the loss of her apparent purpose. This motivates Model 1’s rebellion against her, which is not simply an act of revenge or resentment. In fact, the narrator sees the complexity of Model 1’s feelings, which resemble the complicated feelings of another person. Now that their relationship resembles one between two real people, the narrator starts to fear the being that Model 1 has become alongside Seth and Derek. This fear represents the greatest threat to an exploitative force, which is a will that contradicts it. By joining together in solidarity, the three androids find an effective means of Resisting Systems of Power and Control.
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