The Third Bear

by Jeff VanderMeer

  From his comfortable wicker chair, even with me petting him, Sensio steadfastly refused to speak. Long minutes passed by in uncomfortable silence, broken only by the staccato, almost garish attempts by Aunt Etta at small talk. I remember feeling a perverse pleasure at being a kid, at not being expected to put forth the effort. All I'd had to do to prepare was put on a sun dress and let Aunt Etta tie a pink bow in my hair. All I had to do now was smile and pet the rabbit, and dangle my legs off the edge of the chair.

  The circus woman was patient, and she waited for longer than most people. She even waited while Aunt Etta squatted and sidled up to Sensio on the side of the chair opposite me, and then poked him in his side as he nibbled on a carrot.

  "C'mon, Sensio," she said in a wheedling voice. "Come on. Talk for the nice lady."

  I didn't like those pokes. Those pokes were deceptive. When the foreman was around and I did something Aunt Etta disapproved of, she'd poke me in the side like it was a joke, but it always hurt. Sometimes it left a bruise.

  Near the end of this thankless and uncomfortable sitting, with Aunt Etta's pokes becoming more like jabs, a strange thing happened. Sensio lifted his head and a look of recognition, almost sympathy, passed between the rabbit and the circus woman, her mysterious smile growing momentarily larger and fuller before fading. It was so quick and so ambiguous, I couldn't tell if I'd imagined it, let alone begin to understand its meaning.

  A few minutes later, as if on a pre-arranged signal between her and the rabbit, she rose, giving a nonchalant pat to Sensio that, in my imagination, now is elongated and slowed down so that some kind of communication or comment is occurring there. Then, with a smile of sympathy toward me that I warded off by looking away, she ignored Aunt Etta's pleas to give Sensio another chance with some polite collection of words like "a lovely rabbit, but I don't think it's the kind of act we're looking for."

  She handed Aunt Etta a business card and, on the way out, managed to - while giving me the solemn, leaning-over handshake of adult to child - slip a tiny deck of tarot cards into a pocket of my dress. If there was something serious in her gaze, I couldn't understand what it might be any more than I could understand Sensio.

  After the circus woman had left, Aunt Etta folded her arms, stared down at Sensio, and said, "No dinner for you." And then, looking over at me, "For either of you."

  No dinner because of someone else's failure wasn't unknown in our strange, sealed-off household, but this seemed so unfair I began to cry. Or maybe I was upset because the circus woman had left.

  "I'm sorry," I said to Sensio through my tears. "I'm sorry." After all, I had led him into this trap.

  "It would all be the same anyway," he said very seriously.

  "No, it wouldn't be," I said. I don't know what I meant by that, though. Did I mean if he'd talked to the circus lady or something else?

  "I am not what she wants me to be," Sensio said.

  "What are you then?" I asked him, bringing his warm fur up to my face as I hugged him close. "What are you?"

  "Does it matter?"

  After Aunt Etta kicked Sensio, she dragged him through the dirt back toward our bungalow, holding the rope tightly in her boxer's fist. There was no one to see her do it. The workers had the afternoon off and the foreman was out at a local bar.

  I was screaming, kicking at her, but she didn't even notice. Sensio remained silent. Not a squeal, not a squeak, although it must have hurt him terribly.

  "Stop," I kept shouting. "Stop!"

  But she wouldn't stop. She was caught up in the moment. She couldn't stop. Something hidden at the core of her had come out. She would have dragged him through the rows of orange bushes, choking, until his fur came off and he was raw and spasming. She would have turned him into rabbit stew without any protest from Sensio, as if this was what he had been set on earth to become. There wasn't even anything personal about it, and that made it worse, like she'd planned it all along. Like she'd wanted it to happen that way. Was it because she couldn't stand being turned into a fool? Was it from sheer frustration?

  All I know is that I ran back to the post. With a grunt, bending my knees, I put my bulky frame to use and pulled the post out of the ground in an explosion of dirt, splinters ripping into my hands. When I caught up to Aunt Etta - she was still dragging Sensio by the rope around his neck, his paws flopping in the dirt - I shouted "Stop!" again in my loudest voice. But still she refused to hear me, so I had to make her hear.

  I hit Aunt Etta across the shoulders with the post. She turned to me with a distant look on her face. I couldn't tell you what that expression meant. It didn't stop me from smashing her in the knees, through that ridiculous armored skirt. It absorbed some of the force of the blow, but she still let out a loose, oddly high-pitched cry of pain. She lurched to the side, but regained her balance.

  "Stop it, Rachel," she said. "Just stop it. It's just a rabbit." She was breathing heavily, and her words sounded like they'd been said in a foreign language.

  I hit her in the knees again, with all my strength. She cried out again, this time more piercing. She fell almost like a statue, straight down, as if she had no joints, the skirt settling around her like a parachute. She was slapping out at me as she fell like I was some sort of insect rather than a big, clumsy twelve-year-old with a wooden post in her hands. Even then she refused to let go of Sensio, her hand clenched white against the rope. Maybe it was just a reflex, but I saw it as more refusal, more proof that Sensio was in danger.

  I hit her in the head. Once, twice. She gasped like all her breath was rushing out of her, tried to get up, and my anger turned to fear. If she got up, she would do to me what she was doing to Sensio. And I could not let that happen. I hit her one last time.

  Aunt Etta groaned and slumped and lay still while I freed Sensio from the rope. His fur had been ripped off in places, revealing pink, bloody skin. There was sand and grass and dirt all over him.

  "Are you okay?" I asked him, frantic as I cradled him in my arms.

  But he said nothing.

  You can see the photograph now, as a postcard, in antique stores and gift shops in Florida. Sometimes it comes with a funny title, like "She dealt swiftly with evildoers." It has been doctored to include shadows for both Sensio and Aunt Etta. Her clothes have been colored, as has his straitjacket uniform. Because of these changes, which make the photo look even less real, there is no chance that anyone would ever believe Aunt Etta really tied a talking rabbit to a post and, dressed in her Sunday best, had someone take a photograph of her with the rabbit. No one will ever know that I was there, too, or what happened after.

  I came to my senses a few minutes after I'd hit Aunt Etta for the last time. She was making little broken sounds in the dirt and had a big, bleeding dent in her forehead. Her eyes were open but glassy, as if she had already turned inward. Every couple of minutes her body would convulse. I knew that I had hurt her badly.

  I'd dropped the post and was babbling to Sensio as I held him against my chest. We'd escape together. We'd hide out in the orange groves, or we'd make our way to Key West and hide out there, like I'd seen in a movie once. Or maybe we'd even travel to Tampa and find the circus woman and she'd help us out. "She liked you, Sensio," I remember telling him. "She'd definitely help us." As if I were an adult, or had any money, or any sense.

  After a while I realized Sensio wasn't answering, which to me, in that state, meant he didn't agree. Slowly, a cold, clear mood came over me, and I knew what we had to do, what we could do to survive this together.

  I scuffed up the trail from the photo shoot to where Aunt Etta's body lay to make it harder to tell what had happened. I used leaves and a branch to obscure any of my footprints. I took the post with me, and later burned it. Then I went back to the bungalow, treated Sensio's wounds, and put him in his cage, telling him, "No matter what questions they ask, don't say anything." I thought I saw him nod.

  Then I had the operator call the foreman at the bar and told him I'd found Aunt Etta, "be
aten up by someone." The foreman called an ambulance and the police, and came barreling back in his ancient truck. I was bawling by Aunt Etta's side just like a kid of twelve would bawl if she found her aunt brutally attacked and left for dead. I did it because I had to, yes, but also because by then the madness had left me and I was truly sorry.

  As the ambulance took Aunt Etta away to three months in a coma followed by brain death, the policeman on the scene asked me, "Have you see anyone you don't know around here lately?"

  Through my sobs and hiccupping and snot, I told him that an old man with a face like weather-beaten leather and missing an eye had come looking for Aunt Etta, but I'd only seen him the once. I figured telling them the man was missing an arm, too, would be laying it on too thick.

  "Could you identify him if you saw him again?" the policeman asked. He was in his late forties, losing his hair, and had a kindly voice that made me feel bad.

  Yes, I nodded, although I knew they'd never find him.

  After they'd finished questioning me, I stayed with the foreman's family for a few weeks before being picked up and sent back north to live with the cousin who hadn't wanted me before. I guess the sympathy money A. C. Pittman threw at him made me more appealing. I even got to take Sensio with me, in a little cage in the backseat next to me. No one was willing to tell the girl who had suffered such a trauma that she couldn't keep her only friend in the world.

  I talked to Sensio the whole way up, but in the way a child might to an imaginary friend so the cousin, who smelled of too much cologne and was throwing me strange glances from the driver's seat, wouldn't get too concerned. Sensio didn't answer me. That was okay, I reasoned. He'd suffered a trauma, too. It would take time for both of us to recover.

  The same newspapers that had ignored Aunt Etta when she'd tried to sell them on a talking rabbit, now splashed the details of her injuries all over their pages, referring in lurid tones to the mysterious man I'd described for the police. They even interviewed the photographer, whose account of that day didn't include the fact that he'd witnessed Sensio talk. But the man did leave the strong impression that Aunt Etta had been both a fool and a witch. Then it all died down, and Aunt Etta passed on without them having caught her murderer, and I imagine life went on in the orange groves much as it had before for the migrant workers and the foreman and whomever Pittman got to look after his house full of expensive junk.

  It's been many, many years since that day captured by the photograph, and in most ways there's been nothing special about my life. I grew up, went to college, mostly on money it turned out Aunt Etta had kept for me in a trust fund. I left my cousin's house as soon as I could, became an accountant, and did well enough to come back to the small town in Minnesota where I'd been born and have a respectable career, live a respectable life. I found religion and lost it again. I dabbled at children's stories but never found the right voice. I fell in love on a cruise and married my husband John two years later. He's an attorney, and we have two kids, Bobby and Sandy, who've left home already for families and lives of their own. I used to go to a lot of PTA meetings and high school football games. Now I've retired from accounting, serve on the city council here, and do a bit of gardening. My marriage has had the highs and lows you'd expect, but there are some things you can't tell anyone, and the possibility becomes more remote every year. In short, there's nothing unusual about me. I could be anyone, anyone you know, and think after meeting her, "She's a nice older lady, but a little boring." I am more a ghost in my life now than as a presence beyond the edge of that postcard.

  But even while I listen to some citizen talk about storm drains at a city council meeting, or weed the garden, I am still having conversations with Sensio in my head. So many conversations that I don't know what to do with them sometimes, don't know how to distinguish between what's been said and what's always been left unsaid, so that there are moments when something rises inside of me, unable to get out but unable to rest. Useless questions. Useless thoughts.

  That third dinner, the night before the photo shoot, Aunt Etta made a fuss, wanted it to be formal and "just right." She'd suffered what I thought of as a change of mood that I found suspicious; she seemed almost giddy, almost happy. We waited at the foot of the stairs while Aunt Etta brought down a silver serving set. She claimed Pittman had bought it in Paris and kept it hidden in a cupboard on the second floor.

  Aunt Etta had put on one of her best dresses: a silvery, shimmering thing that caught the light at odd angles so that one moment it was drab, lifeless, and the next it seemed full of tiny shooting stars. She'd taken special care with her makeup so it wasn't so thick or approximate, and she'd wrapped her hair up into a bun. A silver bracelet matched a silver necklace, both of which, up close, consisted of tiny dragon heads. I could smell her sickly sweet perfume from the bottom of the stairs as she came lurching down the steps in her black high heels. Sensio could smell it too; his nose twitched like crazy. But, I have to say, I liked her then. There was a sense, for a moment, of an Aunt Etta I barely knew.

  With exaggerated care she swept by us with her serving set, giving us a smile of benevolent regard, and saying, "Sensio, I just know you will love this dinner. You will love it."

  Sensio said nothing.

  She disappeared into the kitchen that abutted the dining room. Interesting smells and sounds had been coming from the kitchen for hours.

  The table had already been set. The cutlery gleamed in the fractured light from overhead lamps. I arranged Sensio atop his pillows again, to the left of Aunt Etta's place at the head of the table. I sat next to Sensio, in case he needed help.

  "It smells good," I said to Sensio.

  Sensio made a sound between a grunt and a sneeze.

  Aunt Etta brought out the first dishes, which were to be served, buffetstyle, in silver bowls. Squash and broccoli and green bean casserole, and potatoes au gratin with cheese crisped in frozen waves on top.

  We ate silently because it was delicious and we were starving, Aunt Etta smiling at us from time to time from her newfound "shining city on the hill" as the church preacher might've put it.

  Sensio didn't eat much, but this didn't seem to bother Aunt Etta. Mostly, Sensio had a sense of watchful waiting about him. But I ignored that, just as I put aside any misgivings about Aunt Etta's cheer.

  Finally, Aunt Etta disappeared once more into the kitchen and came out wearing oven mittens and carrying a huge silver bowl, twice as large as the others, with an ornately etched lid.

  She placed it on the table in front of us, and produced a ladle. A stillness had come over her, a kind of grand anticipation.

  "This is something extra special for you, Sensio," she said. "I hope you like it."

  With a flourish, Aunt Etta uncovered the bowl. Steam rose, and with it a smell familiar to me. Rabbit stew.

  You might think I would've been horrified. But, oddly, I wasn't. Some cruel little part of me perked up in sudden fascination. What would Sensio do? Perhaps I was mad Sensio didn't talk to me as much anymore, even though that impulse would've been perverse, irrational. It was Aunt Etta who had ruined our conversations, after all.

  Aunt Etta placed a generous portion in Sensio's bowl.

  Sensio sniffed it hungrily, jumped onto the table, put his forelegs on the lip of his bowl. With extraordinary grace and agility, he used his teeth to pick out a carrot next to a meat-rich bone in the thick gravy.

  "It's rabbit stew," Aunt Etta said, as if revealing the twist in a thriller on the radio. Her voice was slick with a kind of self-satisfaction, a sort of smugness.

  Sensio sniffed again, looked over at Aunt Etta, said, "I am not a rabbit," lifted a bone out of the bowl, and crunched down on it with teeth never intended for the task. The sound of the bone cracking and then splintering was loud and grotesque. A sloppy, brutal sound that made mockery of the silver dining service, the opulent dining room, and, especially, of Aunt Etta.

  The air had disappeared from my lungs without me noticing it, and I to
ok a huge gulp. Neither Aunt Etta nor Sensio took any notice of me. Aunt Etta slowly sat back in her chair, struggling with emotions that only occasionally broke the surface of her face in the form of a tic, a tightening of the jaw, a strange look that hinted at both hatred and defeat. All those dollar signs were receding from eyes grown small and cold. Except, thinking back, I don't think it was really about making money off of him anymore.

  But the crunching continued as Sensio, with great delight and deliberation, ate his stew, sucking out marrow as well as he was able, the pink of his nose, the white fur of his muzzle, soon muddy with the gravy.

  It wasn't quite over, but it might as well have been. Aunt Etta attempted a kind of recovery, to overcome the moment with halting conversation, to somehow undercut the enormity of not just one, but two things that defied explanation. As I glutted myself to shut them out, and became drowsy, I seem to recall Sensio saying matter-of-factly, "...there is no time" or "...there isn't time yet," while Aunt Etta whispered over and over, as if to confide in Sensio, "Don't make me look like a fool. Don't make me look like a fool."

  Their conversation seemed to narrow and narrow, like light withdrawing until it was only a single bright point reflected in the darkness of the dining room table.

  I know I should think of Aunt Etta every day. I know I should be kinder to her memory. I know I should be sorrier about what happened. But even when I came across the photo again yesterday, while cleaning up the attic, all I could see was Sensio, and all I had inside of me was frustration, and a kind of anger that won't go away. That I didn't ask the questions before, or the right way, and that this would've made all the difference. Whenever I catch a glimpse of rabbits on TV, or at the mall pet shop, I hope to see one more time that great, that animating impulse in a large, almond-shaped eye, but I never do.