The Plush Bunny

 to begin with, he is the woman’s best friend, and she doesn’t care who knows it. he goes wherever she goes, and people think she’s a nice old lady bringing presents to her grandchild.  she is not nice, though she is old, and she has no grandchild.  she has, in  fact,  no relatives, but she has a few friends.  her friends think she’s crazy, carrying her bunny around everywhere.   they tell her, he isn’t real, you know.  he has no soul.  she raises her eyebrows but says nothing.  they are wrong, of course.  what he has, is no body.   no skin, no flesh. no veins. if you prick him, he does not bleed. if you hold him to your ear even tightly, you will hear no heartbeat.  a tag attached to his back tells you he was made in japan.  on sewing machines.  by sullen, underpaid workers who will one day rise up against the factory owners and break the soulless machines that run their lives. she knows this, and it saddens her.  she would pay them worthily, for their work matters.  but what they make is not a body, only a casing to be filled, over time, with a soul. each bunny’s soul is different, crafted by the owners, their fears, their joys, their every moment’s life.  sometimes she sews things onto the plush bunny; embroideries, or patches of bright material. once, a button, though a small one, and inside the bunny’s ear: nothing to interfere with  the desperate or happy hugging that is the bunny’s due. the button had belonged to a long-dead friend, who lent some of his soul to the woman  for such purposes.  her friends think she is a sad old creature, but they love her laughter. and this is a good thing, for she laughs often, and especially at her friends, though that laughter they do not hear.  it belongs only to her,  and to the graying bunny,  wrapped in its polyester and other natural materials. it belongs to their souls.