by Julián Martinez
Bonito? Just my alias. Bunny? Yes, I’m Bunny who was a doll who became everything to a girl. Anything she could imagine. I was imagination itself! Stardust. Moondew. Gumdrop. Still Bunny when I wasn’t a baby doll— when I was the big red beast from Looney Tunes named Gossamer. I was the nice monster in the dark of the closet, playing hide and seek. Amidst Mama’s shoeboxes and family jackets, was me with big cartoon eyes. Comfort. Surprise. Weirdness made okay. No question unanswered. No thought unsupported. I was an endlessness of funny voices. Every tea party’s attendant. The one who made sure the stuffies on the bed had company while Grace was gone on her first day of kindergarten, and when she peed her pants on the first day of kindergarten, I was in two places at once. I was her everything, she was mine. And when intelligence services needed vulnerabilities in a target, I was vulnerability itself. I was all the tenderness needed to spot the rot on a family with potential foreign contacts. I’d never existed and could be made to never exist again, but I’d always been there. Knew the family’s shorthand and shutdowns inside out. I could be extracted from a young woman’s mind through years of drug use and hypnotic suggestion overseen by agents in deep cover as coworkers and classmates to sublimate her weak spots into a personality. To be given a consciousness. To be given a body, which was just the start of the program’s successes, as the technology it took to create a flesh and blood imaginary friend has gone on to help reanimate corpses for enhanced interrogation methods. Escape space-time through astral projection to gather intel on threats before they sliced their veins. Countless operations employing parapsychology which are aiding the U.S.’ mission of receiving the congratulations of Satan, if in fact He exists— which, what we know so far is inconclusive yet interesting to say the least. Why else would there be so much love in our hearts, if not to be strangled and levied for the furthering of military and monetary intentions? So much weakness on the translucence of a fingertip’s skin to be pierced and pulled until coordinates to children’s children are acquired. So many close relations to mourn and redeem through war. So many accidents on the highway leaving lovers in separate beds in different wards due to different-costing procedures who will always get back together and never let go no matter who they have to help kill to stay alive. The repressed fear of death, which is a tool for profit, which every minute act within each and every system is built around. The fear of death, which is a bow to Satan. The fear of death, which is innately American, spreading deeper by the generation worldwide. It had been through the momentum of the dollar in the analog past, but the dollar could collapse tomorrow, and the fear would carry out its tours. Satan, though He may not exist, has succeeded. The mind has been colonized. The imagination is as much a resource for Satan as the heart. Both lead to Bunny. Bunny is me. Bonito is me. Bunny loves Grace and exists for her blushing cheeks and soulful eyes. The soul, which can never be touched but they want to so badly, they will squeeze all that surrounds it. We’re surrounded— but the imaginary friend, forced into the realm of covert ops, getting married to his target girl, all grown up, was never the plan. We fell in love the moment I was assigned to shadow Grace on my first day of work. I remember her asking me where I was from, us two by ourselves as she unlocked the closet door where the bin of clean climbing helmets were stored— all I wanted to do was pop out from behind that door and go and-ah-BOO!
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Julián Martinez (he/him) is the son of Mexican and Cuban immigrants and is from Waukegan, IL. His work has appeared in HAD, hex literary, X-RAY and elsewhere. His debut collection of short fiction will be published next year by Future Tense Books. The longer story this excerpt is taken from is not in that book-- it's our lil secret Michigan City thing.