It’s rude to hammer on a stranger’s door like that, but the night was ruder still. Leering licks of rain on my cheeks, salacious lashes of wind against my stomach…nothing but damp, eager grossness for miles and miles around.
I doubled my rudeness and was rewarded with footsteps. Slow, stolid footsteps, unhurried but unhesitant. So I wasn’t surprised at all when my host opened the door and was revealed to be extremely fat.
I was a little surprised that it was a bear.
“Hello, hello, hello,” intoned the bear. “Who’s that knocking on our door?”
“Me,” I said. “I mean, me, Melanie. Sorry to bother you, but it’s miserable out and if I could just duck inside for a minute, I’d really appreciate it.”
“Why not?” said the bear. “Bad weather makes for good neighbours. Come in, come in!” There was a tie around its neck which bobbled in a disconcerting way whenever it spoke, and its mouth held an impressively tiny little pipe.
I maybe should’ve found it odder, that a bear spoke, but it didn’t seem shocked by it so neither was I. Clearly this was all intentional.
So I went into the house, which smelled of fur and soap.
Inside the house were two more bears, seated around a little round table. The smallest was a little shorter than me but – in the way of bears – probably double my weight at least. The middle bear was wearing an apron, and was trying to pick up a spoon with no thumbs.
“This is Mother and Baby, and I’m Father,” explained my host. “As you can see, we were just sitting down to dinner. Want some? It’s porridge. Good, nourishing, plain porridge. No sugar, no milk, no h-word –”
“Honey?”
There was a bang. Baby had jumped and knocked over their chair.
“In this house,” said Father carefully, “we don’t use the h-word. It’s good manners.”
“Sorry.”
“It brings up decadent, degenerate thoughts,” said Father a little louder than was strictly necessary, even against the background clang and rattle of Mother’s ongoing efforts to seize her spoon.
“My mistake.”
“Hideous, crawling, STICKY thoughts, that trickle and…”
“Humble apologies.”
Father shuddered like a man dropped in an ice bucket. “Anyways! Please have some.”
“But there’s only three bowls,” I said. “I can’t take your family’s food.”
“No, no, please, I insist. Mother needs to watch her weight – she’s in real danger of getting hefty. And as for Baby, well…”
I looked a little closer at Baby. There was a muzzle fitted over their snout, hiding most of their face except for the little dark eyes. They seemed worried.
“We’re just having a Time Out to teach everyone to respect their elders,” said Father. “Might have to dole out a spanking later. Spare the rod or spoil the child. It’ll hurt me more than anyone else, really. Here’s your porridge.”
It was a big spoonful. I took a little bite. My tongue split the difference and was merely sort of burned.
“Aagh.”
“Oh dear. Perhaps my porridge is a little much for you. Mother, give our guest some of your porridge.”
Mother dropped her spoon again, and this time it skittered under the stove. Father tsk-tsked soundly, plucked up his own spoon – which seemed to be a repurposed shovel – and gave me some of her porridge.
It was cold. It was lumpy. Actually, it was lumps, verging on lump. If this porridge had ever felt the heat of flame, it’d forgotten about it and then some.
“Eegh.”
“Goodness. Perhaps not. Baby, would you mind letting this nice young lady have some of your porridge?”
Baby said something. Or maybe not. It was hard to tell, with the muzzle. Father sighed, chewed his pipe, stood up, and smacked Baby on the side of the head, sending the cub caroming ass over teakettle into the stove. Squealing.
“Baby, you know very well that children should be seen and not heard,” said Father. “Sharing is caring. Now get in your chair again – and for pity’s sake, sit up straighter.”
Baby’s porridge was soothingly warm, well-stirred, and smooth as butter. I wasn’t very hungry.
After dinner we retired to the living room. It was unpainted, although someone appeared to have dabbed pawprints along the east wall before giving up entirely. In attendance were a couch that looked fresh from the dump, a rocking chair that looked more likely to roll over on you, and a discarded beanbag.
“I must apologize for the state of the house,” said Father. “We’ve only recently settled in, you see, and my wife has been somewhat lax in putting our affairs in order. Making a house a home, you know.” He sprawled himself expansively on the couch, felt around in the cushions, and produced a tattered newspaper. “Sit, sit.”
Baby sat down on the beanbag, and Father ground his teeth against his pipestem, sat up, and flicked Baby on the ear. “Not until the lady’s seated,” he said.
I looked at the couch and saw that most of it was Father by volume; I looked at the rocking chair and saw an interesting obituary; I looked at the beanbag and saw a thriving, nourishing habitat for small things with six legs.
I also saw Mother, standing against the wall. She was chewing her paws, and at my stare she flinched and whipped them behind her back.
“Sit, sit, sit,” said Father, rolling his pipe around his lips like it was toffee-coated.
“Oh, I can’t take Mother’s seat,” I said.
“Nonsense. She’s been a silly flittergibbit – cooked the porridge all wrong, didn’t paint the living room properly, hasn’t said a word to our guest, spoke out of turn to me over breakfast, all that sort of nonsense, etcetera, etcetera,” said Father. He hummed thoughtfully through his pipe. “Really, it’s a wonder I put up with her. Now take a seat. It’s only polite. A watched pot never boils.”
I sat down in the beanbag chair, doubtlessly extinguishing thousands of tiny skittering lives under my backside. Father grunted in satisfaction, riffled through his newspaper, and proceeded to read it upside down, held high to catch the last of the evening light through the murky clouds.
I stared at it, and things made a lot more sense.
“Well,” I said. “It’s been very nice of you to put up with me, but I should be going now.”
“Oh, no, no, no, no,” said Father. “It’s still raining out there. Can’t put you out in the rain, it wouldn’t be Christian of us. Better stay in.”
“But –”
“No buts,” said Father. He looked at Mother and Baby, still standing against the wall. “No buts,” he repeated. “No buts. No. None.”
“If it’s not too much trouble, I suppose I can stay on your sofa…”
“Sofa? Lord, no! You’ll get a bed, and be happy with it.”
Mother raised her head.
Father’s pipe dipped meaningfully and she looked away again, out the window, to the rain.
Father’s bed was an enormous, beaten-up old thing that looked to have been used to smuggle at least three bodies, one of which had left scraps caught in the exposed springs.
Mother’s bed was a tangle of old spruce boughs and pine needles, dumped into an empty wooden frame that was somewhere between IKEA and archaeology.
Baby’s bed was the beanbag from the living room, dragged into the familial bedchamber and covered with a generous tea-towel.
“I really shouldn’t,” I said.
“You really should,” said Father.
I started to say something that’d start with “but,” and then I saw Father’s pipe shifting around again.
Baby tried to crawl in with Mother, but Father raised his paw and his voice and Baby was exiled to the corner of the bedroom, where they formed a sort of fuzzy ball with no external features. Or targets.
I adjusted the horrible tea-towel and waited for the snores to start.
Soft little whimpers, kept low for fear. That was Baby.
Uneven, jagged inhalations, somewhere between a pant and a whisper. That had to be Mother.
And then the deep, confident rumbling nasal-festival began, and that could only be Father. Nothing else matched it.
Ten minutes. Five was what I wanted, but ten was what I needed. Enough to make good and sure they were asleep.
Nine-min-utes-and-FIFTY. Nine-min-utes-and-FIFTYFIVE. And-now-it’s-TEN.
I breathed in, I breathed out, I tensed and I heard Father stop snoring.
He got up. Quietly, I’ll give him that. Quiet for his size. It was amazing how much smaller the room seemed once he was on his feet; it was as if his snores had forced the walls back and now they’d fallen in, leaving this cramped little cavity, full of fur.
Then he moved. He moved past the dead leaves of Mother’s bed, warding his big feet against the dry crunches. He moved past the little trembling lump of Baby’s corner.
He moved to my feet, sticking out under the tea-towel, out from over the edge of Baby’s beanbag. And he stopped.
It was amazing how loud his breathing was, this close. Louder than his snoring ever had been.
I hadn’t untensed. Had he noticed?
But he leaned down, and I knew he hadn’t. Not to be moving this slowly, this carefully. He could see better than I could in the dark – especially with my eyes squinched near-shut – but he wasn’t looking carefully enough. Why should he be? He was in his house, which was his castle. Impregnable. Unconquerable. The ringmaster of his own domain.
He’d gone to bed with his pipe. It was still there, dangling from the corner of his mouth.
“Shh,” he whispered. The pipe wiggled and hummed, and an idea that had been bubbling up inside me finally boiled.
I snatched it. Left-handed, which nobody ever quite expects. And I was in a hurry, and I was frightened, and I snatched a bit hard and fast, and that’s why it snapped apart in my hand – that and the fact that it was just thin lacquered wood, over a frail tin whistle.
Father reared up with a snort that was more of a swallowed shout – it moved enough air to give me a new hairstyle (and a few grey hairs) and sprayed me with a good glass-full of moisture. The ceiling crunched against his skull and gave way; plaster sprinkled over us and gave him a powdering a judge’s wig would envy. Big dark eyes in a fat pale face, and they weren’t friendly, and his arms were up now, and his claws were out, and who knows what could’ve happened because it didn’t because someone else did first.
“Someone’s been sniffing round my den.”
The voice was thick, rough, unpracticed, and moist – with harsh mucus, with trickling anger. It was a voice you could find carved into an old limestone cave.
And it wasn’t Father’s.
He flinched. Just a little, but impossible to hide on a body that size. I saw his lips curl – not in a snarl, not quite: they were reaching for his missing pipe.
“Mother, go back to your –”
“Someone’s been sniffing round my den,” said Mother. She didn’t interrupt Father, he practically did that himself. There was a wheedling, plaintive edge at the end of his every word, like a mosquito.
He tried one last time. And I’m no expert – on bears, on people, on families – but there is something I’m pretty sure of: he shouldn’t have started his last chance the way he did.
“But-”
“Someone’s been SNIFFING round MY den,” said Mother. “And he will GET. OUT. NOW.”
Father reared back, and whether it was to raise a paw or turn away I’m not sure because Mother moved faster. She hit him hard, she hit him fast, and he spun round and his ear went out one window and he went out the other. By the time he hit the ground his legs were running, and by the time the rest of him had caught up and got started she was after him, and accelerating.
I sat there for a good minute – not a measured minute, a good one. Then I got up, undid Baby’s muzzle, and got out of the way before they bowled me over, chasing Mother.
They were all gone, all three of them, and I didn’t feel like they were coming back.
But you’d better be sure I didn’t walk out of that house. I flew so hard and fast that I didn’t know until I got home that I’d brought the broken whistle with me, clutched in my left hand.
A whistle in my left hand and a headline in my head, stolen from an upside-down, claw-torn newspaper.
TR IN D B ARS ESCAPE CI CUS
ST LL MIS ING