on a rope around his neck, and as he began to play, the male stood on his hind legs and swayed back and forth to the music.
“Faster,” called a soldier at the front of the crowd, and the boy quickened his beat. The male bear struggled to keep up, and when he tripped over the hem of his skirt, the man pulled out a stick and beat him across the face until his nose bled. This made the people laugh, and a few of them threw coins, which the drummer collected before moving on to his next song.
When night fell and the audience went home to their suppers, the man removed the muzzle from the male’s snout. Then he put a collar around his neck and attached it by a chain to an iron stake driven deep into the ground. He and the boy retired to a tent, and when she was sure they had fallen asleep, the bear crept out from behind the hedge and approached the chained dancer.
“I don’t normally talk to strangers,” she said, “but I saw you here and figured, well, I guess there’s a first time for everything.”
The male was lying in an awkward position. His skirt was gathered around his waist, and she saw that great patches of his legs were without hair and that the skin in these areas was covered with open sores. “I used to talk a lot to my mother,” she told him. “She and I were all each other had, and then one morning, out of nowhere, she just… died. Gone. Before I could say good-bye or anything.” Maybe it was the moonlight, maybe the excitement of meeting an entertainer, but for whatever reason, she actually managed a tear—her first in almost six months. It was running slowly down her cheek when the chained male raised his head and spoke. “Can you understand me?” he asked.
The bear nodded, though in fact it was quite difficult.
“That’s good,” he said. “Most animals can’t make out a word I’m saying, and you know why?”
She shook her head.
“It’s because I have no teeth,” he said. “Not a one of them. The man in the tent took a rock and hammered them out of my head.”
“But the muzzle—,” the bear said.
“That’s just to make me look dangerous.”
“Oh,” the bear said. “I get it.”
“No,” he told her, “I don’t think you do. See, I have maggots living in my knees. I’m alive, but flies are raising families in my flesh. Okay?”
The bear shivered at the thought of it.
“It’s been years since I’ve eaten solid food. My digestive system is shot, my right foot is broken in three places, and you’re coming to me all teary-eyed because your stepmother died?”
“She wasn’t a step,” the bear said.
“Oh, she was too. I can see it in your eyes.”
“Well, she was just like a real mother,” the bear said.
“Yeah, and piss is just like honey if you’re hungry enough.”
“Maybe males in this part of the country say every ugly thing that enters their heads,” the bear said, “but where I’m from—” That was as far as she got before the man and the boy came up from behind and hit her over the head with a padded club. When she came to, it was morning, and the male lay on the ground before her, his throat slit into a meaty smile.
“He wasn’t no good to us anyhow,” the man said to his assistant. “The knees go, and that’s that.”
Now the bear travels from village to village. Her jaws are sunken, her gums swollen with the abscesses left by broken teeth, and between the disfigurement and the muzzle, it’s nearly impossible to catch what she’s saying. Always, though, while tripping and stumbling to the music, she looks out into her audience and tells the story about her mother. Most people laugh and yell for her to lift her skirts, but every so often she’ll spot someone weeping and swear they can understand her every word.
The Mouse and the Snake
Plenty of animals had pets, but few were more devoted than the mouse, who owned a baby corn snake—“A rescue snake,�� she’d be quick to inform you. This made it sound like he’d been snatched from the jaws of a raccoon, but what she’d really rescued him from was a life without her love. And what sort of a life would that have been?
“I saw him hatching from his little egg and knew right then that I had to save him,” she