Rabbit woke up and looked at his reflection in the enormous mirror over his bed.

He’d inherited the mirror from some previous tenant – a sex pervert from the cocaine 80’s perhaps? Rabbit left it on the ceiling in part from lazy entropy and in part for its kitsch value.

He used it as an icebreaker at the bar; saying, “Believe it or not, I have a mirror over my bed…. Creepy right? It was there when I moved in.”

And sometimes a woman would come back to the flat to confirm the story and they would laugh and speculate about the previous tenant: Maybe a sex pervert from the cocaine 80’s? Maybe a kinky gay man? Maybe an exotic prostitute? Maybe a cocaine addled, gay, exotic prostitute from the 80’s?.

They would laugh and think about the tawdry reflections the mirror might have cast once upon a time and it all became too funny and ridiculous and they would fall into the bed with ironic laughter and a sort of lonely, drunk, narcissistic curiosity. He would watch the women watching themselves laughing and then not laughing and then kissing him and then stripping and eventually he watched them watch themselves fuck him. The kitsch and the irony falling away to “oh what the hell?” experimentation. The mirror was meant to be ironic, but it worked like a charm none the less.

He got his nick name, Rabbit, from a mousy girl named Alice. She had a strange Lacanian response to the mirror and regressed into ridiculous baby talk at the sight of herself floating on the ceiling. She kept calling out his name during the act, “Robert oh Robert.”

But it grew softer and softer, smaller and smaller into baby talk: “Robert, oh Rabert, oh Waabbit, Oh rabbit…”

“Did you just call me Rabbit?” he asked. “What is this an Updike novel?”

“Rabbit want to go in the hole?” she asked.

“What?”

“Wabbit want go in de hole?” she repeated.

“What?… Yes. Sure. I guess.”

“guess what wabbit?”

“Go in the hole,” he said sort of disgusted.

“Say it right.”

“Yes I would like to go in the hole…. sounds retarded.”

“Say it.”

“Wabbit want go im de hole,” he said in an infantile voice and she fell upon him like cupid at a Roman orgy and it was perfect and magical, if slightly bizarre.

Like an idiot, he’d told his friends the story and the name stuck,… but not Alice. Not any of them. They all came to the mirror an then never returned. He was left like the third wheel of a menage a trois. He was left all alone on the ceiling now floating in the white sheet clouds.

“Fucking Lonesome,” he thought. “No one but me and some asshole named Rabbit.”