In the hours before Creative Writing is set to begin, Bunny sits on the bench across from the Activities Board, where she pretends she is there to plan out her week, to commit her plans to paper. Her legal pad is open to where she’d left off last night. In the margin, she’d made a note: more Stella, which now she crosses out. She manages to write most of a paragraph before Howie interrupts her. “Mind if I join you?” he asks.
“Would it matter if I said yes? Yes, I do mind?”
“Good one,” Howie says.
Bunny begrudgingly admires Howie’s masterful deflection of rejection, his imperviousness to insults. A survival skill, he’s like that animal—Bunny can’t remember which one, but she can vaguely picture it—the one that plays dead to fool carnivores who prefer to kill their dinner themselves.
“I’ve been working on my novel a lot,” he tells Bunny.
“How’s that going?” Bunny asks, as if she didn’t know.
Other than Group Therapy sessions, which Howie attends with the regularity and solemnity of novitiate, he never skips Group Sing-along or Creative Writing. Howie hasn’t actually done any writing, but in Creative Writing, he talks a lot about his novel, the one set in “a place like this.” Howie’s novel is still in the “idea stage.” He is incapable of transferring his thoughts to paper, which is why he whines to Bunny about how the Creative Writing prompts do exactly the opposite of what they are supposed to do. According to the Creative Writing social worker, who isn’t really a social worker, but an MFA student from NYU, the prompts are designed to stimulate the creative process, but Howie claims that the prompts are too vague. “A shoebox. Who could be inspired by a shoebox? A shoebox isn’t creative. Who thinks a shoebox is creative?”
“Depends what’s in it,” Bunny says, which seems to stun Howie, as if he’d been slapped for no reason. He sits there sulking until he can no longer bear the quiet between them. “I’m still thinking it through,” he says. “A novel takes time.”
“So I’ve heard,” Bunny says. Then, she suggests to Howie that he write about Pam. “About your fateful night. That’d be a good story.”
As if inspiration has propelled him to his feet, Howie pops up and asks, “Can I borrow some paper? Just a couple of pages.”
Bunny tears away eight or ten sheets of paper from the back of the pad, which she gives to Howie along with her pen. He takes off for the living room. Bunny, yet again, finds herself staring up at the Activities Board when that new nurse, the one with a small tattoo of a butterfly on her neck, happens down the corridor. She stops and says to Bunny, “How about Yoga?”