The Quickening--New Story

Rough draft of the beginning of a rather odd story called "The Quickening" set in Central Florida in the 1950s in an orange grove/plantation...JeffIn the photograph, Sensio has been dressed in a peach-colored prisoner's outfit made out of discarded polyester and then tied to a small post Aunt Etta made me hammer into the ground. Sensio's long white ears are slanted back behind his head. His front legs, trapped by the crude arm holes, hang stiffly at a slight forward angle. The large hind feet with shadows for claws are, perhaps, the most monstrous part of the Sensio--the way they seem to suddenly shoot from the peach trousers, an impression of arrested speed. The look on Sensio's face--the large, almond-shaped eyes, the soft pucker of pink nose--seems to me caught between a strange acceptance and an incomprehensible rage.Sensio was, of course, a rabbit, and in the photo Aunt Etta's stance confirms this bestial fact--she holds the end of the rope that binds Sensio to the post, and she does so between thumb and index finger--from distaste? From a sense that even a gentle tug would undo Sensio's humiliation? I don't know; I'll never know. All I do know is that the expression on Aunt Etta's face is unreadable, obliterated by the severe red of her lipstick, by the stunning unmatching/matching book-ending of her body by a turquoise crepe-paper bag of a hat and the turquoise dress hitched up well past her waist, white blouse shoved into it--the dress speeding so far down, corruscating like a thin sheet of steel, that she appears, in the photo, to float above the matted grass of the ground.Sensio had said nothing as he was bound, nose twitching at the sharp citrus burn of the orange blossoms behind us. He'd said nothing as we'd formed our odd procession from the bungalow where we lived to the waiting photographer.But now, with the photographer reading the light, he sighed a little and turned his head to stare toward Aunt Etta, and said, "No matter what else, this photograph will remain. Is that what you really want?"