Cottontail

Cottontail
by
Bobby Derie

"Move your fluffy ass, thumper."


Joanna cringed a little and moved aside to let the man go past her. She had her mother's hips, wide and full, and it was sometimes easy to block the aisle on the bus. Still, she thought, as she wiggled the small tail like a ball of cotton at the base of her spine, that was no need for slurs.


Her big brown eyes fell on the scrolling line of advertisements that ran across the ceiling of the bus. Recreational cannabis. Hydrogen fuel cell amphibious cars. Cosmetic gene grafts. The usual run of brightly colored adverts, cartoons, infomercials. Like most people, Joanna had learned not to let her eyes linger on any of them too long, or the software would register interest.


She could feel the eyes on her ass. It was, from a certain standpoint, her best feature: neither of her parents had gone in for genetic breast augmentations, or at least hadn't paid to make them inheritable. That kind of thing was expensive. Her face...well, the lagomorph features set a few people off. More than one person had mistaken her pronounced philtrum as a cleft palate. The doe eyes, at least, could be mistaken for an affection.


Joanna's mother had never quite understood what it was like, growing up. She had been a third- or fourth-generation furry, proudly pointing to her great-grandparents at conventions in the '80s; she had saved up half her life to get the augments and genelifts that made her a "honey bunny" - which Joanna had inherited for free. But kids can be cruel, and pulled her tail and worse things.


Then puberty had set in.


Highschool was bad enough without the ticking genetic time bomb of carefully engineered augments suddenly shifting into high gear. Then there were the...expectations. There were a few other lagomorphs in school. Joanna's parents had known them through the community. Everyone just expected her to...keep to her own kind. When they didn't expect her to just be a horny little rabbit girl, straight from their hentai-fueled wet dreams.


That had been confusing enough. Trying to figure out whether she was a furry, just because her parents were.


The bus came to a stuttering halt at her stop, and Joanna turned to get off. She had to squeeze past a couple of people, her cottontail brushing against them. This time, nobody made a grab for it. Joanna hadn't always been so lucky.

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