Rabbits for Food by Binnie Kirshenbaum

Author:Binnie Kirshenbaum
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literary Fiction
Publisher: Soho Press
Published: 2019-03-05T11:10:25+00:00

The Tip of a Cigarette

With her thumb growing sore, Bunny keeps at it, keeps trying to light her cigarette, but the wind repeatedly extinguishes the flame before it can catch. As if the plastic Bic lighter were like a lawn mower or a clunker of a car and that giving it a rest before trying again might just do the trick, Bunny pauses to afford the lighter the same kind of rest as a tired engine, which is when Elliot shows up. He takes the lighter from her hand. “May I?” he asks, and then he plucks the cigarette from between her lips, too. With her cigarette in his mouth, he cups one hand over the lighter to block the wind, and he gets it lit on the first try. Taking a deep puff, he holds the smoke in his lungs before he passes the cigarette to Bunny. When he exhales, he says, “Damn, that’s good. You never lose the taste for it.” He tells her that he quit smoking almost twenty years ago, but he’d take it up again in a skinny minute, if he could.

“Why can’t you?” Bunny asks.

“That’s funny,” Elliot says, and Bunny says, “I didn’t mean it to be funny. It was a question.”

“Okay. I can’t start smoking again because I don’t want to die before my time.” Then Elliot asks Bunny when is she going to quit and she says, “Quit what?”

“Smoking. When are you going to quit smoking?”

“Never.” As if it’s meant to be an exclamation mark, for emphasis, she takes a long drag on her cigarette.

They stand there, shivering, and Elliot says, “I know how you feel.”

“Yeah,” Bunny nods. “It’s freezing out here.”

“Funny,” Elliot says. “But you know what I mean. The depression.” Elliot tells her that he, too, suffers from depression.

Bunny bites down hard on the inside of her cheek, and Elliot says, “Wellbutrin. It really helped me. Have you tried Wellbutrin?” Elliot waits for Bunny to answer his question, and when that doesn’t happen, he adds, “Of course it doesn’t work for everyone. It’s all about trial and error with antidepressants. But if you haven’t tried Wellbutrin, you might want to talk to your shrink. It’s working for a lot of us.” Us? Elliot, taciturn Elliot, suddenly doesn’t know when to shut up. “I can recommend a first-rate psychopharmacologist, if you want. This guy I go to, he’s good. Top-notch.”

Bunny drops the remains of her cigarette onto the pavement, and Elliot snuffs it out with the heel of his shoe. “Come on,” he signals Bunny to follow him inside. “It’s too damn cold out here. My hands are numb.”

“You go ahead,” Bunny tells him. “I’m going to have a cigarette.”

“But you just had . . .” Elliot stops short. “Oh,” he says, “okay,” and he returns to the restaurant to join his wife and his friends in the warm and satisfied glow of the Red Monkey and the comfort of his genius and his top-notch psychopharmacologist, and his literary success, and

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