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The Immortal Rabbit

By Audris Candra

 

Your most painful death fell upon you when your soulmate had forgotten who you were.

You’d shared a kiss in a previous life, under the lush grape vines on the cusp of Mediterranean hills. His lips were tender with wine, yours raw from his two front teeth.

“We’re immortal,” you said. “Because when our flesh fails us, I will find you.”

You had died together then, on the same battlefield, to defend your homeland against the Romans.

In this life you’re forced to balance on your toes under the golden brush of the ginkgo tree just to catch a glimpse of him. Here he sat on a porcelain garden stool, spine straight and hands smooth from a good life led as a Qing dynasty imperial official.

The wind blew his way; the amber ginkgo leaves swirled in the air. The gust was strong enough to throw your lanky frame off-balance. There was nothing you could do to dampen the crash.

“Who’s there? Show yourself!” he bellowed.

You shouldn’t. You knew he might kill you — he had every right to order your execution for peeping in his private quarters. But the pull of the red strings of fate was tauter than a mortal could bear, and you sat there, legs splayed under you, as he found you bruised and covered in mud.

Soldier, you might have been, in your civilian robes; your soft features and thin limbs could have been mistaken for a catamite’s. An apology spilled forth, stammered and awkward. He narrowed his eyes and turned away. You knew it could’ve been worse, you knew what he knew, and that rejection trailed behind him as he walked away. It could’ve been worse and the worst did happen.

The rice had churned into sticky, slimy congee. The racket caught attention, and the whispers swept across the imperial palace.

At night, a group of fellows dragged you out of the barracks. They couldn’t have you among their ranks — your comfort in your own masculinity was a threat to them. They could never fathom loving another man, and they feared you would infect them.

“Rabbit bastard.” The slur of the era came easy for them to spit. The thud of their fists and rocks and clubs against your skin defeated the crickets’ song.

---

You die again, this time alone with a broken heart.

In the darkness of death, you stand before Yanluo Wang. The God of Death, in his resplendent bloody robe and golden judge’s crown, grimaces. His lips move, but the echo of the beating still rings in your ears. You growl like the beaten animal that you were, frothed saliva laving your broken canine.

You charge, blunt nails raking over nothing.

When you blink, you’re in the cradle of a new mother, your own infant cries foreign to you.

---

You went through the motions of life. Toddler, pre-teen, puberty, and so on and so forth. You were nineteen when you found him under the strobing red and green and blue light of the disco ball. Your own heart drummed louder than the bass in the club.

It was easy to fall for him again, with the way his smile always softened for you and only you. This time he took your hand for a dance, and the crowd seemed brighter, more alive, as if celebrating your reunion.

To outsiders, you were “roommates” who banded together to scrounge up money for rent. During the day he hauled trash for the city and you bussed tables for pocket change; at night he was an artist and you were his muse. If in the previous life you could only obtain a glimpse by sneaking, in this one he kissed every scar you had and mapped every beauty mark and every freckle upon canvas.

You were states away from Stonewall when it broke out, and as much as you wished you could’ve joined the fight, resistance didn’t always look so glamorous and explosive. You sold little trinkets of beaded bracelets to help fundraise, and you weren’t afraid to let strangers couch surf in your one bedroom apartment.

One night, your soulmate asked you, “How many children do you want?”

“Five. Eight. Twelve.”

He laughed. “What are you, a jackrabbit?”

He started drawing you with rabbit heads, soft and fluffy with big doll-like eyes.

Your favorite piece was of your rabbit-headed self, suspended in mid-air, adorned with the brightest scarlet ribbon. It found its home in a local gay bar, the starter of many conversations and passionate nights.

On your umpteenth visit, right under the very same gilded-framed painting, he proposed to you with a candy ring, and though gay marriage wasn’t legal yet, you held a private ceremony in mimicry of one. It was everything you wanted, wasn’t it? Close friends and accepting families, lobster bisque and tri-colored pasta salad.

It was the brightest moment before the darkest.

A disease swept through the world, and everyone needed a scapegoat. It fell on your and your kin’s shoulders, and in the end the world denied your kin the care and love and dignity a human was owed. One by one your friends disappeared; the steady beep of the heart monitor grew to be a blight to you. Until it took over and almost muffled your voice.

His hand was trembling as he held yours, the hospital bed as cold as your bones. “Do you think we’ll be happy in our next life?”

“I’ll make sure we are.”

---

When Yanluo Wang towers over you once more, you don’t raise your fist. The shards of grief inside you have splintered further, and if you don’t wield it correctly, it will dig further into your soul.

You run down the threads of karma, and upon your lips you spill curses for the ancestral baggage that weighs you down. Your chase to find the end of the tangled knots of fate brings you to a banyan tree, the slivers of moonlight dappling between the braided roots, and its lush green canopy lending shelter to an old man.

Yue Lao’s voice rumbles softly through leathery lips. “I am not whom you seek, or even what you seek.”

You are not a violent man — this you tell yourself so that you don’t fist the old man’s collar. Your first incident with Yanluo Wang was an impulse, a rage so unbridled you thought you could go against a god.

“Then what do I seek?” you ask.

“Wasn’t it Confucius who once said that being born a man was the most virtuous thing of all?”

“This isn’t about that. This is about . . .”

“Your love. Once again. I am not whom you should seek. I merely tied your threads together. The rest of your life, I do not speak for.”

Is this how little control you have in your lives? To have strangers deal your cards for the next decades? Who was it that decided that things had to be this way?

You stare at Yue Lao, the Old Man Under the Moon, fire and brimstone boiling your blood. He too is just a cog in the machine, performing his duties of tying crimson threads as the god of love and marriage. You kick the tree trunk with all the might you have, and nothing happens.

You turn your back on him and walk into the white light.

---

What most didn’t understand was that the cycle of rebirth and reincarnation was never really a circle. Time wasn’t linear, and you could fall into any point of the warped shape of history. Here you were again, on this gods-forsaken Earth.

Tucked within the idyllic green surrounding your village, you knelt in front of your mother, your forehead touching the ground. You’d found your people, and joining them meant paying a price: your birth family.

A sigh rustled your mother’s lungs. Your elder brothers were out in the field tilling the day’s worth of work and helping a neighbor with a leaking roof, with all the skills of  tradesmen. You were never good at such work, your fingers delicate and more suited to paint stories with their lithe movements. Still. The last son of ten siblings was still a son.

Her callused hands cupped your chubby cheeks. “If this path is really your choice, don’t ever regret it.”

She cooked rice in coconut milk and wrapped it in banana leaves. You left her with a wet kiss on her cheek and joined the lengger lanang troupe to answer your true calling.

Life on the road always had its ups and downs, especially as an apprentice dancer. You threaded holes in the costumes, cooked for many in one sitting. You loved your peers and they loved you too, a newfound yet familiar feeling.

Then your group crossed paths with a Reog Ponorogo troupe. Whereas yours embraced the feminine in your makeup and flipped your shawl playfully, their performance emphasized their strength, with the main dancer donning a fifty-kilogram mask of a tiger head with a fan of peacock feathers behind it. Somehow it just made sense for your troupe to open for their act — together you trawled the roads from Banyuwangi to Yogyakarta. Even the Sultan himself applauded your dances, a roar from the audience well earned.

That night, the troupe feasted. You sat in the corner and watched as two worlds conjoined.

This time it was he who found you. His footsteps fell heavy and sure, and when he was close enough you could smell his musk — smoky like incense, addictive like love. He tilted his head. “Have we met before?”

You had, of course, in lifetimes before. You didn’t dare say that, because even with the belief in the supernatural, in dreams that could be translated through primbon and the indang possessing you as you danced, telling him felt . . . unfair.

Let you keep your repetitive pain to yourself. Shield him from the truth. You smiled. “Even if we had, getting to know you again would be a pleasure.”

You shared a laugh and many, many glasses of tuak. The sharp sting of the fermented palm sugar spiced his lips, and it could almost mask the pain of multiple lifetimes. Almost.

Falling into the new routine of this life with him was easy enough. The hard part came when the scars marring your soul throbbed, reminding you of the pattern you’d failed to escape thus far.

One night you woke in the middle of the night, heaving from the escape of a nightmare.

He roused beside you, and he touched your hand. “What’s wrong? Did you dream of a ghost? You look like a startled rabbit.”

You heaved, the movement dry and rattling your ribs. “It’s fine. It’s just a nightmare.”

He brushed his lips against your temple. “But it still disturbed you, right?”

You nodded.

“It’s all right. I’m here with you. Even the worst nightmare has to end.”

He cradled your head into his embrace, and you listened to his breathing, to memorize the slopes of his flesh as his chest rose and fell. The rhythm of his breathing slowed a little, a quiet lullaby as he got lost in slumber. You wondered then, if this repeating of yours could be considered a nightmare. You hoped it was, because sometimes, in the darkest of nightmares, if you kicked and screamed hard enough, you’d jerk yourself awake. Perhaps one day you’d find an opening.

Your soulmate was still playful as always. If in your Mediterranean past life he’d sculpted little clay figurines of you, this time he carved abstract shapes, for he’d forgotten the deftness he’d acquired during your time in America. The only thing he managed to somewhat form was a rabbit with a chipped ear. You kept that one with you always, within the folds of the white kemben wrapping your chest.

Alas, the good times never last.

This time it was the Dutch. They took pictures of him and laughed in his face. Neither of you needed to understand — your lack of body hair and your cascading locks were a chafe to them. Their words dug their way into your lover’s heart, and you could see it though he was quiet, his eyes dimmed and his stare blank.

You would’ve fought and shorn those pictures and burnt them along with these invaders’ bones. You would’ve tried to defend your pride and honor. But your cooking knife glinted dull compared to Dutch rifles.

That night, your soulmate sat cross-legged on a boulder on the river bank. “The world is so small,” he lamented.

“It’s small so I can find you.” The smile stitching your lips was skewed. Forced.

No answer came. He kept his eyes on the moon, so round and bright, so far away. He exhaled, and a wind of despair whistled through the land.

News might have spread slow then, but the lack of speed certainly didn’t cushion the impact. Villages were razed to the ground, farmers executed for not complying with the Dutch demand for cloves and mace. They called it a tax, but everyone knew it was indentured servitude.

One by one the dancers left, crossing their fingers that there would be something to salvage of their hometown, that their families had survived against the odds. Your soulmate left too, and he gave you a look when you followed him.

“My family is of twelve siblings. They’ll get by. But you only have a younger sister and a father. You’ll need all the help you can get,” you said.

Something sparked in his eyes, something that looked like hope — or at least you wished it was hope. You trekked the land together, hitched on ox-carts, and avoided any pale-skinned and blue-eyed people as much as you could.

Night had fallen when you reached his home village, but there was nothing left to do but  sift through the ashes. The blackened bones of his childhood home creaked under the slightest touch, and the air churned with ash and decay.

He just stood there, limbs so stiff you feared he might crumble like the burnt trees around you. You had to coax him to settle on a lone gazebo near the dried rice paddy, the only thing left standing all around you. He limped by your side and crashed onto the bedroll.

“They might still be alive,” you said. “They might’ve escaped.”

“Sometimes surviving is worse than death,” he said.

And you couldn’t find it in you to retort. You and these cycles of rebirth had beaten it into you that even death never meant the end.

When you woke up, he was nowhere to be found. No foot tracks, nothing. It was as if the ghosts of his family had nabbed him in the middle of the night.

This choice of his might have been made quietly, but it was violent all the same. You cried until your voice was croaks punctuated with exhales, you clawed the earth in fear of it having swallowed him up.

Had it been just a dream, all of this? Did you hallucinate your time with him? You couldn’t even ask the dance troupe you once called family, especially when the force of war and invasion scattered them far.

Your spirit might have been grieving — once more — but your body moved. It tilted in a direction it had memorized, back to your home village.

Your mother embraced you with sallow eyes, her limbs so brittle you were afraid that even the slightest force would kill her too. So your arms hung by your sides, until they too grew thin from the forced labor decreed by the Dutch.

The only comfort you could find was when you told your mother that you had never regretted leaving home.

---

You stand alone in the void of the afterlife. Water rises, painting red streaks as it laps against your ankles. When you bring your hands in front of you, your skin fissures along your meridian, like earth cracked from eons of thirst. It burns with the rage of a thousand suns, and you have to let it out. You have to hurt as much as you’ve been hurt.

Yanluo Wang steps across the water, his boots sending ripples to the dark horizon beyond. “Are you willing to talk this time?”

Confusion is an understatement. You stare up at him, and the Chinese god of death shrugs. “Third time’s the charm.”

You wipe the back of your hand across your lips, your skin leaking with thick dark liquid. “What do you want?”

“I’ve always thought this pantheon lacked something. An understanding of . . . well, I’m sure you’ve learned well by now.”

“Why me?”

“Why did people deify Guan Yu when Lu Bu was stronger? I like you. I admire your spirit. Isn’t that enough?”

You blinkd blackened tears, sharp with salt. “What can a mortal like me do?”

Yanluo Wang barks a laugh, the sound thunderous like horses galloping across the plains. “Do you really think all these reincarnations were meaningless? Do you really not feel what they have done to your soul?”

If you close your eyes, all you feel is the ache still burrowing into your soul. But if you scratch the surface just a little bit, you find that the rage has been woven into your very core.

That wrath is a source of power.

You have to rage against the most hopeless of hopes, because without wrath and ruin, you’d be nothing but cinders. You follow in Yanluo Wang’s footsteps through the boundaries of the Heavenly Realms. You drip ichor from the tips of your tainted robe, the discharge so pungent the lesser attendants drop dead.

You mar the ivory steps into the palace, and the wooden gates melt under your fingertips. You run towards the cluster of horrified gods, and when you leap you shed your humanoid form for your lagomorph self.

“Who was it?” you howl. “Who was it that whispered in the ears of the emperor? Who among you had the right to declare my love impure?”

None of the gods answer; all are compliant.

They have spent thousands of years lounging on their thrones, rendering them sluggish. What are they compared to your lifetimes of tragedies?

You had to fight to carve a mark in the world, because the world will always resist, and there is nothing more noble than sinking your own rabbit teeth into it.

A small delicate creature on earth, seen as prey and source of food. To be protected or cherished as a pet. To be used as a slur during the Qing dynasty. But here you tear through gilded robes and snap the golden chains around their necks. Every chunk of flesh you tear is a victory, every drop of blood you drink is a proclamation.

You’re here.

You’re here, and there is nothing they can do to erase you.

The gods cannot die, of course, not when there are still people praying to them. People who need them, no matter how twisted they are.

What you have done is a forging. You hammered their kinks, tempered their faults, and only now you’re here, standing on their corpses, do they bemoan their flaws.

Yanluo Wang’s hands are soft around your matted fur as he lifts you up. “Do you feel better now?”

“Only if this changes something.” You heave and shudder, not believing your own power.

“And change you shall.” Yanluo Wang smiles.

The god of death turns to the mangled limbs and writhing mass and picks you up, the scene comical despite everything. You can’t help but laugh at the blinking eyes and broken lips, apologies beaten out of them.

“Then I will ordain you as Tu’er Shen, the god of love between men,” he says. “Starting with your own love.”

You blink, too baffled. You’ve never wanted to be one of them, especially not when it could corrupt you. Turn you ignorant to the ways of the world.

“Don’t make that face. If anything, we need you here. You’ll keep the balance.”

You tilt your soft rabbit skull.

“How about this?” Yanluo Wang said. “Make your first decree as a god, and you can live your next life in a world influenced by your powers. Then when you return here, you decide what you do next.” His hands grow warm, and so does your body.

This time, you don’t resist.

---

The age you were next born into wasn’t one free from strife. People still argued — there was no life without struggle, you supposed. But at least your decree had rippled its waves.

Girls could now kiss in public without risking being stoned, and boys could just be boys. You hadn’t used your powers without thought — you had blessed those like you, with a fire inside them, to make sure they were protected to carry the mission and pass the torch. After all, there was nothing in this world that could be achieved alone.

It was he who found you first. In this life he had short stature and stubby fingers, but his shape never mattered — you would worship whatever form he was in, vessel and all.

He was the first to extend an invitation when the university canteen was too full. You fitted seamlessly into the group, and your soulmate did his best to hide his reddening cheeks behind his hands, looking away whenever you caught him staring.

As much as you were wary of repeating tragedy, your love for him triumphed over any hesitation when he asked you out on a date.

The breeze under the golden ginko tree brushed your cheeks. You shared your cucumber and ham sandwiches with him, and he brought a thermos of oolong tea and sesame balls with red bean fillings for dessert. He had been the one to choose this spot in the park, right by the river with seats made of porcelain. Questions bubbled up — Did he remember? Was he trying to apologize? Or was it just a coincidence? — but you put a tight lid on them. This was your time together; you didn’t want to let the past get in the way of your future.

You talked about nothing and everything. About your favorite pets (his were rabbits), your favorite drinks (his was osmanthus tea, but it’s an acquired taste so just to be safe he hadn’t brought it today. You let him know you’d love to try it), about his love for baking (and your whimsical idea of making osmanthus and mango tea cake to go along with the tea).

It wasn’t a surprise when his hand slowly crept across the stone table to reach yours.

His voice softened. “Before we move forward, there’s something I’d like to tell you.”

Your heart fell into your stomach. Did he really remember, then? Would he blame you for being tangled in a cosmic circus? Would he hate you for all the times you’d failed him?

“You see . . . I wasn’t born a man, and I don’t want to lead you on or waste your time because I don’t have the same anatomy as a typical man. And right now, I have no plans to acquire one either. I understand if this doesn’t suit your preference —”

You leaned forward and caught his lips. “You don’t have to worry about that, love. If you say you are a man, then you are a man.”

His fingers curled tight around yours, and in that moment, your love was immortal. Your wrath had ensured it so.

---

Host Commentary

. . . aaaaand welcome back. That was “The Immortal Rabbit” by Audris Candra, and if you enjoyed that then they have a list of their other published works at audriscandra.carrd.co — that link, of course, will be in the show notes. You can also follow them on both Instagram and Bluesky as audriserat

I don’t think there’s anything in this world that makes me as sad, or as angry, as not letting people be themselves. Not letting people be happy in the way they need to be. If you, personally, don’t believe in same-sex marriage, here’s the full extent of your solution: don’t go and marry someone of the same sex. That’s it! Anything beyond that is in neither your remit nor your power. Leave people be, let them be happy, learn to accept that you are not, in fact, the centre of all things, the fulcrum upon which all opinion and morality is balanced, and that not all business is your business.

Which is, of course, incredibly naïve of me, I know. The reason the world can never leave us alone to just be happy is that misery is a weapon of control, and control is far more important to some than concepts such as “decency” or “morality”. For others, I suspect, consciously unaware but subconsciously furious at the control others wield over them, it’s that misery loves company.

At a deep, emotional level, I don’t get it. I don’t get how you can sleep at night knowing you are making other people scared, unhappy, blocking them from being truly themselves and with whom they truly love. I resent that the world now has taught me to understand it at an intellectual level.

I have to hope that the moment we’re in, where the moral arc is springing back and away from justice, is just a reactionary kneejerk, a two-steps-forward-one-step-back deal, and that if we weather this storm we’ll get our two steps again. The current trans panic in the UK feels like it’s following the 80s gay panic almost beat-for-beat, including toilets and changing rooms once again becoming sacred ground where everyone has the right to treat it as a private space on a par with their own bed, underpinned by the unspoken assumption that everyone in the targeted group is a barely controlled sex pest who will be overcome by lust at the very sight of the homo/transphobe.

But if it is following the pattern book, then at least we know decency can win out. We know that the sea change is possible, and that once we tip the balance it can change faster than we could ever imagine — from section 28 still being in force as I finished school at 18, banning any discussion of homosexuality, to a complete and unquestioned acceptance of queerness among the sixth formers by the time I started working in schools only five years later.

It is bullshit that we have to dance this dance again, that people have to suffer, and be deprived happiness, largely at the behest of the most selfish and disconnected subset of humans to ever exist who now control our communal media as a hobby . . . but it’s a new year, and we should start it with hope, and determination, and the conviction that love and happiness and acceptance are the harder and worthier path, not a childish refusal to acknowledge a difficult world: that it is in fact the cynicism and hatred that are grounded in a child’s selfishness and self-importance. Be brave enough to be kind, know that love is radical, remember that hope is not a fragile thing, and that as long as any of us are still fighting for that better world, the light at the end of the tunnel is not extinguished, and we can still walk out of the darkness and into that better dawn, that new day, full of light and warmth and love. Happy new year.