Burly Tales

by Steve Berman

  Table of Contents

  BURLY TALES edited by Steve Berman

  Introduction - Matthew Bright

  Three, To The Swizz'! - James K. Moran

  The Red Bear of Norroway - John Linwood Grant

  Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, Something Blue - Jonathan Harper

  Snow Melt and Rose Bloom - John T. Fuller

  The Three Little Prigs - M. Yuan-Innes

  A Giant Problem - Charles Payseur

  The Most Luxuriant Beard of All - B.J. Fry

  The Man Who Drew Cats - Alysha MacDonald

  Heft - Mark Ward

  El Muerto's Godson - Evey Brett

  Lesson Learned - Rob Rosen

  Bears Moved In - Ann Zeddies

  Afterword - Jeff Mann

  Art - Jazz Miranda

  About the Storytellers

  Copyright

  Introduction

  Matthew Bright

  ONCE UPON A TIME, WE told stories, and these stories shaped us. Stories always have. There are volumes written about how folklore both reflects, as well as creates, how we see the world. What else is myth and folklore but the power of pure narrative, passed down through the ages, and transformed? Once upon a time, and still to this day.

  If I were to mention ‘fairy tales’ in this day and age, most likely the first images that would spring to mind would be Disney’s. But much of Disney’s output is a sanitised, saccharine iteration of such stories with much darker routes, and paths into darkened woods littered with breadcrumbs. This corporation’s spun-sugar narrative has undoubtedly left its mouse-shaped imprint on our ideas of romance and love for generation upon generation. Prince Charming, and his happily ever-after. This impact is also covered in volume upon volume. But the debate of whether these ideas are warped or aspirational, I leave to others, in other introductions, and in other books about fairy tales. Instead, I’m here to ask: if fairy stories reflect the world back to us and also shape our world, how about we try those stories with a different shape? Particularly, a round shape. A rotund shape. A hirsute shape.

  But when discussing fairy tales, let us bravely attempt to be realistic. The cast of Prince Charmings across the last half decade of pop culture is so white and difficult to tell apart that it might as well have been decided by Ryan Murphy, the mind behind modern T.V.-fairy-tale fare served up in huge helpings including Glee, American Horror Story and Scream Queens. Modern female leads in fairy tales are little more diverse. And let us be further realistic; the gay community is not exactly unfamiliar with, but rather intimate with, placing the ideals of the young, thin and pretty on a pedestal, despite the astonishing diversity of those who comprise our community somewhere over the rainbow.

  In recent years there has been a notable rise in ‘recasting’ the familiar white-washed faces of some fairy tales, particularly where such fables intersect with queer culture. Think cartoons of the Prince’s Grindr profiles. Gender-swapped princesses. Cosplays that switch up race and gender. But for all this ironic subversion, it is still common to see the same iconography at play: the hopes and dreams of the thin and beautiful. In the world of fairy tales, it’s a culturally ingrained idea that the fat body belongs only to the realm of the inconsequential, arguably the farcical, but certainly the villainous. And these characters do decidedly do not get to live happily ever after.

  Here at Lethe, under the Unzipped imprint, we have often championed erotica and romance collections that put the more traditionally overlooked body type front and centre. It’s easy to get heavy (pun unintended) when talking about representation. It can so easily become fraught, laborious, worthy. But if some of our earliest ideas of love and romance can start in the uncomplicated roots of fairy tales, then we think everyone deserves the chance to be a part of that ever-after, that magic, maybe that darkness, too. We want to create stories full of joy and froth, silliness and escapism, lightness and sexiness, whimsy and hirsuteness. Inconsequential stories are consequential.

  This time, we are taking on fairy tales as our theme. Sure, some of us fledgling queers might have grown up identifying more with the princesses in these stories, but if, in your later years, you have found yourself built more like LeFou than Prince Eric, then that happily ever-after might not appear as a foregone conclusion at all. Balls to that! Consider us your fairy godmother. If you’ve been wondering if someday your prince will come, well... here he comes, and he’s put on a few pounds.

  Run away with us to the woods, where the cubs and bears are not going to eat you (not without informed, enthusiastic, consent, anyways), where no one will judge you if you take up residence in a house with seven bearded men and only one bed, and where, if you fall in love with a large, hairy man with a forbidding castle and well-stocked library, he will still be that way after you kiss him.

  Come get your happily ever after.

  —MATTHEW BRIGHT

  Manchester, England

  Three, To The Swizz’!

  James K. Moran

  WITHOUT MASKS, THEY ALL STOOD on the Alexandra Bridge that spanned Ontario and Quebec. Beneath it flowed the Ottawa River. Sunlight winked off the white caps and filled Tom, who said, “Oh my gods, guys, I fucking needed this.”

  Each of the friends inhaled and exhaled to savouring the taste of freedom, as well as the smells of dirt, trout, and perch. The mournful cry of a seagull drifted from afar.

  “We can tell,” Dave replied. “First time walking?” For a quiet coder who dressed emo in a black-on-black ensemble, sporting multiple earrings, Dave could bare the sharpest horns.

  Tom growled through his beard and lunged toward Dave, becoming a marauding predator of red-black-and-white plaid shirt, sleeves rolled up, and denim jeans.

  Dave retreated to Reece’s far side. They hadn’t horse-played like this since their twenties. But today was special.

  “Don’t poke the bear,” Reece said, chuckling. In khakis and a button-down, his hair and goatee freshly shorn, Reece did not run. His was a quieter rejoicing, savouring a moment over a mixed drink, whether watching a televised Olympic victory at a bar or attending Ottawa’s annual Pride parade.

  And Tom couldn’t stand his cool demeanour. They were out. They were alive. “I thought we could celebrate it being over.”

  “Spoken like a true therapist,” Reece said.

  “Coming from an accountant, I’ll take that as a compliment.”

  Behind them, across the Ottawa River, the Museum of History stood on the Quebec side. Even today, the globular buildings appeared mixed contemporary. In May daylight, under a peacock-blue sky, surrounded by a verdant lawn, it looked like an H. R. Giger creature had wandered lost into Gatineau, and settled down by mistake.

  “Ahem,” Reece said. “Gentlemen… if I may?” He lit a tightly rolled cigarette.

  Dave sniffed. “The green where we graze.”

  Tom arched his eyebrows comically once, twice.

  “Well, don’t just stand looking all manly,” Reece said. “Take it!”

  Tom accepted, took a drag. The joint hidden under his paw, he shared with Dave.

  It went around.

  The river flowed westward. The museum hugged the shoreline on the left, before yielding to red brick and panelled residences, and green space. The water of the rapids shushed, far off. The sun, behind them, glazed the sight as though in an impressionistic painting.

  Tom cleared his throat.

  Reece saw tears in the man’s eyes. “You okay, big guy?”

  Tom nodded, wiped his nose. “Just thinking of the last time we got out. The last time that anyone got out.”

  “We can frolic in the fields again,” Dave mused, his tone hushed, amazed.

  Reece wrapped an arm around Tom’s shoulders, stretching to do it. “We even all
scrubbed up for the occasion.”

  Dave rubbed his goatee. “I didn’t shave this.”

  “It took you a pandemic to grow it, so I don’t blame you,” Reece said.

  Dave, his turn with the cigarette, dragged hard, hacking up a puff of smoke. The cloud streamed upward, briefly appearing like horns atop his head.

  Sounds of yelling and of pumping music rose from below. The trio hurried to the railing and looked over and down. A ferry was passing under the bridge. Strobe lights roamed across it, from bow to stern. Multicoloured streamers flapped from the railings in the breeze. Men gyrated on the starboard. Reece counted a dozen. They were all large, and they all wore leather accessories of some sort. Two in the centre of the pulsating mass, broad-shoulders covered in leather, wore matching pants, chaps, and boots, all a move. The man on the right, trying to match his dark-skinned dance partner’s contortions, looked up to see Tom, Reece, and Dave staring down.

  “Who are you?” Tom yelled down to them.

  “Can’t you read, handsome?” The man tipped his cap and a swipe of his moustache, à la Freddie Mercury. He gestured to the banner on the port side, facing Tom, its garish, multicoloured letters—The Twelve Dancing Princesses—arranged in a prism of colours. Beside that, in equally large, letters, it said, Ottawa Knights Pandemic Recovery Fund. “We’re sneaking off to party with the princes!”

  The man’s dance partner swished long, pitch-black hair. His coffee-dark eyes were discernible even from afar. “Don’t tell the king!” he cried in an equally rich voice, swinging his hips, his leather forearm cuffs. The mane of hair hid his face, revealed it again. He too was hirsute, although less so than his burly companion. He compensated for this lack with lustrous, mocha-coloured skin. Tom and company guessed it was likely very smooth to the touch, as was his black beard.

  The dancers wore facemasks around their necks, not over their mouths. On closer inspection, Tom saw they were multicoloured. Stylistic, not functional. A shorter, Chinese guy, pleasantly stout, and leather-capped, pirouetted around the duo.

  “Where you headed?” the capped fellow, whom Tom had addressed, yelled up, barely audible. The ferry was getting too far away, turning away from the three friends. The man gave a palm rub-down of his barrel chest, hidden behind a layer of hair.

  “Swizzles!” Tom hollered over the music and distance, adding, “Woo-hoo!” He was unsure if they heard him.

  The crowd of dancers, now all looking up, hoorayed in return.

  They must have heard something, then, he thought.

  “See you on the other side of the thing,” the capped one shouted, although barely audible.

  His fellow dancer yelled up at them but the ferry drifted completely out of earshot and the partygoers waved farewell.

  “I think he said, ‘Go, Hairs!’” Dave said.

  “‘No Hairs?’” Tom guessed.

  “Ah,” they said together, united in a sudden deduction: “Go, bears!”

  “Geez, someone was hitting on you,” Reece told Tom with a baleful gaze. “What else is new?”

  “Yeah, what is with you?” Dave asked.

  “Some things haven’t changed during isolation,” Reece drawled. “You’re like the Captain Jack Harkness of the queer circuit.” He was gesturing widely with the joint, as though it were in a cigarette holder and he a southern belle.

  Tom bore a grin that, even through his rangy goatee, could break a heart or split firewood with its charm. Tourists always used to ask Tom for directions. No matter where the friends went. And they had been through it all together. Some tourists even asked Tom what was the best route to his bedroom.

  Dave leaned into Tom, took an exaggerated sniff. “Is it the manly musk coming from that merkin on your chin?” Dave was not as active in Aikijujitsu and Karate as he was in his twenties, but for someone in his late thirties, he was limber. Chuckling, he easily dodged Tom’s swipe.

  Dave sidled up beside Reece and Tom again, closer together than they would have before the pandemic, but not as close as in their university days, after they’d met one another at a LGBT mixer.

  “Remember that pick-up line you used sophomore year?” Tom asked Dave.

  ““Hi! My name is Dave and I’m ...”

  “ …Chinese and queer.” Dave cringed.

  Reece rolled his eyes. “Unlike myself, being black and bi. Gentlemen, as you are aware, I consider that pick-up line some good, old-fashioned bullshit that I would never, ever, deign to say. Draw your own conclusions.”

  “My conclusion is that we’re all far more classy than then,” Dave countered.

  Reece and Tom understood this as a reference to being in their early thirties. Each had a relatively stable career that somehow weathered the pandemic. Tom even had his own private practice, an office on the posh stretch of Somerset Avenue.

  They pushed off the railing turned away from the river and headed down the path that descended to the foot of the bridge and into Ottawa. Below, on the left, a seldom-used path led up from under the bridge. Parliament stood to the right, or west, stoic and stony. The National Gallery’s glassy tower stood leftward, to the east. Across from it loomed the U.S. Embassy in all the militant glory of a highly fenced perimeter. Reece once referred to it as Mordor, and had once dared a one-night stand to venture into the embassy and be a modern-day Frodo by dropping a doublets into the diplomatic washroom.

  “So, if those are the dancing princesses, what are we?” Tom asked.

  Reece slapped him on the back. “The three billy goats gruff, of course.”

  They all began to laugh, a marvelous thing almost-forgotten during the pandemic. They watched the people teeming in the streets of the Byward Market, from the gallery onward, the vast colours of not only the rainbow, from the populace of a city of nearly a million unleashed to go for coffee, or ice cream, for a drink, for a date or a hook-up, for a meal on a patio with friends in a country wise enough to not only legalize cannabis but also sodomy and marriage.

  “Tell me, what’s so funny, fellas?”

  They heard the voice but couldn’t place it at first. Until, one-by-one, they looked to the path under the bridge. Someone stood half-hidden, the border of shadow and light showing little more than a toothy grin and ripped jeans, boots old and scuffed but almost brutal in their thickness and stains.

  “Celebrating freedom again?” the stranger asked.

  The friends all exchanged a knowing glance.

  “You know him?” Reece whispered. “I don’t.”

  Tom and Dave shook their heads. “No,” they answered in unison.

  Eyeing the stranger, Tom was reminded of the bridge’s uneasy history of hate-crimes. In the late 1980’s, during that summer when he discovered the mystery of wet dreams, a waiter heading home from work was accosted by three young men, who had followed him through the night-time cruising area of Major’s Hill Park, mistakenly assuming he was gay. The waiter was attacked and briefly held over the edge of the bridge by his ankles before being dropped into the water. “I like your shoes,” reported on endless newscasts, quickly became the cruel taunt every bully used in middle school the rest of that year. Tom, months before a growth spurt, heard it as he was tripped or shoved against lockers.

  “And yourself?” Tom asked, taking point as the tallest.

  Reece extinguished his handiwork during his friends’ momentary hesitation.

  The stranger drew closer. “Is this where all the fags hang out?” He stared at Reece. “Fag, as in joint?” Again, that grin. “That’s what the British call a dart. And you’re all fags, right?”

  Dave stiffened and, out of reflex, drew closer to Tom. Once, in university, while the friends were leaving a Byward Market bar, some drunken jock had begun screaming at Dave, before hurling him against a wall in the nearby alleyway. Thankfully Tom was just behind him and intervened. The walk back to their shared apartment had been taciturn one rather than the usual nocturnal joust of who had caught the most hither-come stares from locals.

&
nbsp; “Oh, we get it,” Tom said, stepping in front of his friends. “You’re hilarious.”

  The stranger’s boots scuffed the pavement. The leather vest and ripped denim were a nod to rough style but could not disguise his considerable, furry girth. He looked like he would be at home lurking on the edge of a leather bar’s dance floor or a Mr. Leather competition, albeit the kind of contestant who wouldn’t put in the work and would still expect to win the title.

  “What do we have here?” The man’s grin was either flirtatious or menacing. “The three billy goats gruff, eh?”

  A pause. He looked at Reece. “The snob.”

  Reece’s cheeks flushed. “Opinions vary.”

  He glanced at Dave. “A runt.”

  Dave narrowed his eyes at the speaker.

  And then the stranger addressed Tom. “Oh, and the refugee from Goldilocks: one of the bears.”

  Reece began heading away from the man. The others followed downhill.

  “Leaving so soon? See you on the other side, then!”

  The friends walked abreast and, coincidentally in order of size; Dave on the left, Reece and Tom on the right. Cars passed in the adjacent lanes on their right. Someone honked as they passed by.

  “Anyone know what that was about?” Dave asked, obviously referring to the asshole under the bridge.

  “No clue,” Tom said.

  The friends attempted to shake off the encounter with the, for lack of a better term, troll. For a moment, they only had their quiet thoughts. Ahead of them lay Ottawa, and the sea of people. Tom, Reece and Dave had walked these streets countless times before, pre-pandemic. Now those days seemed distant and halcyon, as though they took those late alcohol-and-drug-fuelled late nights for granted. But the pals were out again, in the open air, having crossed the divide and each of them was as fresh as the spring weather, randy for adventure in all its shapes and sizes after some much time cooped up, trying to arrange weird online hook-ups or date when they could. They were ready for just about anything, troll be damned.

  Tom, at least, felt fit to burst. At last, he spoke. “To the Swizz’, then.”