Bunny Man's Bridge: A Sampling from a Short Story Collection by Ted Neill
By Ted Neill
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About this ebook
WINNER BEST SHORT STORY COLLECTION - Independent Press Award
FINALIST - BEST SHORT STORY COLLECTION - Next Generation Indie Book Awards
A sample from the award winning author's short story collection Bunny Man's Bridge which Kirkus calls: "A mix of fantasy and coming-of-age stories . . . At the collection's core are the same themes that make [Neill's] Elk Riders fantasy novels so rewarding, albeit presented through the greasy lens of young adulthood. [These are] addictive tales that read smoothly while aiming for the gut."
Ted Neill
Globetrotter and fiction writer Ted Neill has worked on five continents as an educator, health professional, and journalist. His writing has appeared in The Washington Post and he has published a number of novels exploring issues related to science, religion, class, and social justice. His debut novel City on a Hill combines his passions together into a thought-provoking page turner with a compelling female protagonist, Sabrina Sabryia. His epic fantasy series, Elk Riders, follows a band of unlikely allies brought together by a mysterious elk as they square off against dark forces taking shape in their world and even in their hearts.
Read more from Ted Neill
Two Years of Wonder Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Bunny Man's Bridge Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Selah Branch: A Novel of Time Travel and Race in America Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
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Bunny Man's Bridge - Ted Neill
Bunny Man’s Bridge
A Short Story Collection
By Ted Neill
Dedicated to the other founding member of Love Contusion, because, oh my God does love hurt, but I’m still grateful for all the happy memories.
Table of Contents
Introduction
3. Quarry
7. Oral Composition
10. Milk Money
12. Idolatry Soup
17. The Houseguest
Introduction
According to legend, on the outskirts of the town where I grew up, there was once an asylum for the mentally deranged. The shuttered ruins, crumbling and moss covered, could still be visited in a boggy dell deep in the woods. The asylum had been closed because of inhumane treatment of the patients, but one of the patients never really left. He still lived in the woods near the property. Nobody knew his real name. He had been abandoned there when he was a child. With no family to claim him, no home to return to, he simply lingered in the forest, close to the only home he had ever known.
The asylum had been built more like an eighteenth century prison than a hospital: all heavy, mortared stone, windows barred with iron, and bare cells—their floors strewn with straw like animal stalls. This one patient in particular kept to himself, eventually settling in an abandoned farmhouse where he managed to be self-sufficient, growing his own food. He eschewed human contact, preferring the quiet company of a few dozen wild rabbits, whom he domesticated, eventually breeding hundreds. The rabbits were his sole companions, and he knew every single one by name.
Years passed and people in town left the Bunny Man
alone, writing him off as an eccentric hermit. He was undisturbed until some high school students snuck onto his property one night. They were three football players and three cheerleaders: letter jackets, cardigans, knee socks, and all. The girls thought the bunnies were cute and wanted to take some as pets. The football players wanted to prank the Bunny Man, with the old ring-and-run on the doorbell.
It was all innocent enough, at least until the girls tried to run away with some rabbits for pets. One of them tripped and fell on a stolen bunny, breaking its neck.
That was when the Bunny Man snapped. The long dormant madness erupted as the Bunny Man chased the teens through the midnight forest, a forest he knew well from years of wandering and foraging. They did not stand a chance. Lost, separated, and frightened, the teens were easy prey. All that was ever found of them were scraps of their bloody letter jackets and cardigans. And then there were the dismembered body parts found hanging from the nearby train trellis that dated back to the Civil War.
There was no real evidence for the Bunny Man story, of course, except the landmarks of the train trellis, an old graying farmhouse, and a crumbling stone building that many assumed had been the asylum, although some said it was instead a prison for the Union army, others for the Confederacy, maybe both. After all, the lands of Northern Virginia had changed hands numerous times throughout the war.
But evidence isn’t as important as imagination when it comes to legends. The story of the Bunny Man was passed down from one generation of teenagers to the next as they took midnight trips down the dirt road to the sagging farmhouse or trekked through the woods with flashlights to the asylum—boys carrying six-packs and bags of weed, glancing furtively over their shoulders, hoping that the girls hanging onto their arms might let them cop a feel . . . or more.
Later iterations of the Bunny Man legend evolved to have the Bunny Man actually wearing a pink Easter Bunny costume in order to lure children to his farmhouse, where he would do unspeakable things before slaughtering them. The traffic tunnel that led to Bunny Land,
as the woods were called, even had a pink bunny spray-painted on its side, complete with murderous red eyes and a bloody mouth filled with overlapping fangs.
As preteens, we would hear whispers about the Bunny Man among our older siblings or babysitters, and we were, predictably,
deeply jealous of our elders who would actually get to visit this midnight land of terror and adventure. In that way, a trip to Bunny Land became a rite of passage and, eventually, a fitting image I landed on when thinking up a title for this little collection of stories.
The stories are old and young at once. Old in that they were written almost twenty years ago, so long ago that I come across passages, characters, and snippets of dialogue that I have no recollection whatsoever of writing or even sketching. And to be frank, at risk of sounding immodest, I’ve been surprised, once and a while, by a twenty-year-old’s level of craft and insight. But I ascribe this more to luck and having the great writers I was reading at the time to learn from than my own talent.
But these stories are young as well, written as they were by a young man, himself on the cusp of adulthood at the time, and influenced by more than a little bit by Raymond Carver (isn’t everyone at some point?). I was looking back on a childhood that had come to a close, while trying to process the present and all its possible paths. As I wrote, I knew I was trying to prepare for this thing called adulthood,
which was stretching before me, a great unknown.
The characters are experiencing the typical things of that stage in life: coming of age, the sudden onset of insight, the stumbles of early relationships, the mystery of sex, the role of gender, and the wider question of what it meant to be a decent, successful human being. Some of the stories look back, others forward. Others are zany fantasies, tragi-comedies where I was trying to make sense of the confusion, to disarm the impending horror of growing up with humor.
A fair warning: when I submitted some of these stories