Sample Sunday: New story

This story hit me a couple days ago. I am in the midst of final rewrite/edit of something else, but I decided to get the opening out of my head anyway. This is VERY rough and will likely be cut back later, when I have time to work more seriously on it:


My mother, unfortunately, has a healthy dose of whimsy; far more, in fact, than a grown woman should possess. She spends most of her days making cutesy little fantasy figures out of clay and carefully painting them with minute details. (I was in my teens when I finally figured out the sale of those little things were what mostly supported the family. I took more interest in them.) My father was only interested in his four sons and spent far less time at home than he should have. He and the older three boys were off on some camping trip the day I was born.

But someone should have stopped my mother and her sense of whimsy before she named me. I would have been far happier.

I was born on Easter. My mother, not being particularly religious, still decided she must somehow acknowledge such an event. So yes, she named me Bunny. And you know, if her last name had not been Hopper, I probably could have lived with the choice.

So, go for my middle name, right? Well, she had named my older sister after one of my grandmothers: Mary May Hopper, which is bad enough. But mom had already intended to name me after her other grandmother.

Haqikah.

No, I didn't just cough. My grandmother was Egyptain. The name means honest.

Bunny Hack-cough Hopper.

From the age of eight until I was fifteen, I almost daily begged them to allow me to change my name. My mother would smile and shake her head and go back to painting unicorns. My father would wave me away and tell me to speak to my mother . . . as he headed out the door with the Tom, David, Mike and later Brad, who was born the year after me.

My life in school was hell, of course. You can't be a teen with a name like Bunny Hopper and not expect to pay for it. Then, just after my fifteenth birthday, I joined a Tai Chi Chuan class and took up meditation. I finally learned to embrace my Inner Bunny.

Turns out he's really vicious.


Beware the Wrath of Bunny Hopper