The rabbit girls are long-limbed and twitchy. They only speak in rabbit sounds: hissing and honking. They bite Judith when she tries to brush their hair. While she’s in the shower, they sneak outside to play in the garden, which means trampling all over Judith's waterlogged herbs and tomato plants. Mister, the neighborhood cat, terrifies them so they run back into the house screaming. Inside, they shit on the floor and piss against walls. They only sleep during the day, snoozing on and off. 

You must remember to lock the door, she reminds them every day, and turns the deadbolt back and forth to demonstrate. Mildred gnaws on her own fingers; Frances chews the ends of her hair. You can use your house keys to stab someone in the eye if they try to take you or hurt you, she tells them, showing them again on a tomato and leaving her own key sticking out of the flesh. Her own mother had taught her that. She gives them the same list of who “they” might be: mostly men with loud voices, men with roaming eyes, men with grasping hands, boys just being boys.

The girls are the product of too much drinking and too much chanting. Judith had been crying about being an aunt for the sixth time and still not having a family of her own. She’d scrabbled the shoebox with the remains of the original Mildred and Frances, two beloved Belgian hares, out of the dirt with a gardening trowel and her bare hand. Then she washed the delicate bones by hand in the kitchen sink and laid them out on the table in the shapes of two children, side by side. She tore a tomato from the garden apart with her fingers and slapped the pulverized flesh down on the table where hearts should beat. 

One girl’s left eye is milky as a marble just like Mildred’s, and the other growls low in her throat, like Frances, so that’s how Judith names them. They like to sprawl on the couch with Judith and nuzzle their faces against her knees. Frances is more affectionate; she’s always headbutting Judith in the stomach, licking her hands when she doesn’t expect it. Raising her arms so Judith will pick her up and carry her around the house. Mildred tolerates quick side hugs, but otherwise doesn’t much like being touched. Some days Judith gets mixed up and tries to carry Mildred to the bath in her pee-soaked pajamas, or she forgets to pet Frances back quickly enough and there is crying and hissing and somehow more pissing and shitting in all the wrong places.

Judith has to believe they’ll get used to baths, then toilets, then clothing and combs and ponytails. And that eventually they’ll understand safety.  She’ll someday stop finding the girls motionless in the living room, eyes wild, fixed in place by Mister's gaze through the window. They’ll quit opening the door to anyone, no fear whatsoever of the doorbell, or the police-like knock that announced package deliveries. They'll be able to go to school, she’ll be able to miss them while they’re gone. 

On Tuesdays when they get home from weekly karate class, the girls run around locking and unlocking all the doors, flinging them wide open then front-kicking them close. They stab their shiny house keys into all the tomatoes on the counter while Frances screeches an approximation of ki-AI! 

When Judith signed them up for karate at the cheap place in the strip mall closest to her house, she explained the girls were a bit wild, not well mannered, but the white guy who introduced himself as Sensei Dan just laughed and said dude, all kids are monsters, right? During the girls’ first lesson, Judith waited in the car and listened to NPR on low volume and thought about how her house smelled like a litter box, how she was behind on work, how she had never been so tired. 

Judith perches on a folding chair with all the other parents and watches as the girls do warmup kicks, punches, and blocks with the rest of the class, then they do their yellow belt test and Frances mouths ichi-ni-san-shi, which she’d refused to do before, and Mildred makes the same scrunched face when doing her kata as when she brutalizes tomatoes. When they finish, the whole class bows almost in sync and then the two neat lines of students break into chaos. The girls come up to her afterwards holding their belts, honking and happy; they rub their faces on her arms and shoulders, Mildred even licks her palm.