Burly Tales

by Steve Berman

  He laughed. “If you’re a religious man, Theodore,” shouted he, “now would be a good time to pray!”

  I wasn’t a religious man, though I did sometimes shout, “Oh God!” during certain unspeakable acts. But I tended to doubt that counted. And still I prayed. I prayed for William. I prayed for us.

  He reached the top branches, which were so thin that they shook with every step he took. I glimpsed the top of his head. The top of his head met the end of my beard. He looked up, his round face smiling broadly, the blue in his eyes twinkling like the stars in the heavens.

  “You have blue eyes!”

  “Thank you for noticing.” To which he added, “I’m too low.” He needed the tree to be at least another twenty, maybe thirty feet.

  I leaned out farther as he stretched his arms up to me. But still we were far apart.

  “Wait,” I yelled. My third idea I hoped would be my best. I grabbed as much of my long beard as I could and pushed it over the window sill until it become a shimmering, soft stream flowing down and down and down.

  My heart momentarily stopped pounding. “Can you reach it?”

  With a grunt, he said, “I … I think so!”

  As I felt several firm tugs, I braced my feet against the wall of the tower, my hands against the rim of the window, and pulled back as he began his climb.

  “Your beard is so soft and luxurious, Your Highness.”

  I blinked. “Thank you for noticing!” was my pained reply. “And?”

  “And it makes it difficult to move fast!”

  I nodded. I clenched everything I could clench. And then I waited. And then I waited some more. And at long, long last, the feather of his red hat came into view, and then, finally, those eyes of blue.

  I reached down and grabbed his arm. I reached down as he reached up, and with all my strength, I heaved him up and over, both of us falling into my room, him on top of me, me below him, the feeling utterly indescribable.

  He smiled as he huffed, and I smiled as I huffed, and we simply lay there staring as we fought to catch our breath.

  “I believe,” said I, finally with no need to shout, “you had something to tell me in person, good woodsman.”

  He nodded into my chin, the red of his beard blending with my blond one. He gulped and said, “I love you, my prince. I love you with all my soul even having never seen you before. My eyes, after all, do not need to see what my heart surely feels.”

  I grinned. I grinned, then kissed him. Then kissed him again. “Seems we are both rather poetic these days.”

  It was then I learned my lesson. I knew it as sure as I knew I loved the bear of a man that pressed into me, the pebble finally a boulder, the fur of his arms tickling the fingers that held onto him for dear life.

  DAYS LATER, MY FATHER PAID me his standard visit. He flung the door open and strode in before coming to an abrupt halt. He was shocked to see two men greeting him instead of the usual one.

  He sucked in his breath but then smiled as he noticed the hand in mine.

  “Ah,” he said. “And what lesson have you thus learned, my son?”

  I smiled as I gripped William’s mitt of a hand in mine. “Love, sire,” I replied. “I have learned love for someone other than myself.”

  “Took you long enough,” said my father as he moved away from the door to allow us to pass.

  “Tell me about it,” I replied as I tripped over my beard and into the world outside.

  Bears Moved In

  Ann Zeddies

  AUREN CAPELLI, SCROLLING THROUGH SUMMER apartment rentals ads, snapped to attention when his roommate Drew, called out “Yo, there’s a moving truck in front of that house next door.”

  He dropped his phone into the cushions of the couch, and Ashley, his other roommate rushed to the window sill before he could; he was forced to peer around their heads and shoulders to see the latest development about the local mystery.

  He glimpsed a squad of movers, unloading a full-sized semi. They emerged with an endless series of boxes from the truck’s depths, then an eclectic collection of furniture in at least three distinct styles. Then the movers banded together to drag out exercise equipment. Contrary to all logic, they hauled the gear precariously up the rear exterior stairs and up to the third floor.

  “Look at the different types of machines,” Drew said, craning his neck to watch, though once the equipment was safely transferred without anyone falling off the steps, he lost interest.

  “Lucky you’re moving out,” he told Auren, “I bet all that stuff will make a terrible din when they turn it on.”

  “I suppose…”

  Auren wandered back to the couch, and Drew plopped down next to Auren to lace up his cross-trainer shoes. Moments like these both enticed and repelled Auren. He enjoyed the smell of Drew’s sweat and Axe, the proximity to his bare shoulder. All that coiled muscle right next to him. Drew was everything Auren felt he was supposed to want, with the additional spice of presumptive straightness.

  “Well, you have two weeks to figure out where you want to live this summer,” Ashley said. “Just let me know if you find another place. My cousin and his friends could use your room.”

  Drew smacked Auren on the shoulder and jumped to his feet. “Sure you don’t want to come with us to the gym? I have the membership till the end of the month. I can still get you in free as my guest.”

  “No thanks.”

  “All the guys on Grindr are ripped.” Drew lifted up his shirt to show his abs.

  “How do you know about Grindr?” Auren asked.

  “I’m very aware—”

  “Thanks, but the gym is just not my thing.” Auren found working out only made him feel lonelier than ever, even when the place was crowded with sweaty, grunting men. His roommates might not believe it, but Auren liked exercise, being flushed, out of breath—when he was a kid, Auren snuck out at night sometimes to run across the nearby golf course, deserted at that hour, and surrounding thickets. He jumped walls, climbed trees, and felt strong, powerful, invulnerable, in the magical cloak of night. But the gym seemed like a performance he had never rehearsed for. Truth was, ever since he was a kid, he felt his chunky frame embarrassed him, and the golden hairs that sprang up all over his chest and arms and legs only made him feel even more like an outsider. His high school gym teacher once referred to him as a cryptid.

  Drew picked up his gym bag and smart phone headed out the door.

  Ashley called out to him to “Always swipe right!”

  Auren laughed. “Should we be placing bets when Drew comes out as bi?”

  She shrugged. “Let’s not change the subject away from you. What about that guy you used to go out with?” she asked. “Jack? Or Zack? He seemed like he was connected. Maybe he could hook you up with someone who needs a roommate for the summer.”

  “We don’t talk much.” Auren would rather even go back to his parents than rely on Zack for help. But he wasn’t about to explain that to Ashley.

  A horn honked outside.

  “My ride’s here—gotta go.” She left in a swirl of blonde ponytail and cute athletic skirt.

  Drew relaxed into the musty old couch, grateful for the silence. An interrogative mew announced that his cat, Bear, was emerging from his hiding place behind the couch. Bear glared suspiciously at the door to make sure the other humans were gone, then trotted over and plumped his considerable weight into Auren’s lap.

  “Meh,” the cat commented.

  Auren stroked Bear’s fluffy fur.

  “Me too, Bear,” he sighed.

  He’d lived in this shabby condo just off the bus line with Drew and Ashley for the last two years. This summer, they both had other plans, and because Auren couldn’t afford the rent on his own, his friends were subletting their rooms to Ashley’s cousin and his friends. Summertime had become the beginning of the end.

  From his bedroom window, Auren had often gazed at the topmost gables of the old house next door. It was a Victorian edifice, three stories
high, cluttered with spires and gingerbread. An architectural monstrosity, it still seemed attractive to Auren after his years spent in dingy, cheaply-built student housing. He wished he could magically transport himself and his belongings down the block, to reappear in a hidden nook in the old house. The place had stood empty for some time. No one seemed to know who was the property manager.

  Now he felt punched in the gut that someone else had found a way to rent the mystery house.

  His parents would have been happy to have him move back home. He could have lived with them all through college, and let them pay for everything. But he couldn’t tolerate the numbing vapor of faint hope and perpetual disappointment that wafted toward him every time he made a choice that wasn’t their favorite.

  Being gay wasn’t the problem; it was never any secret. His parents had never paid attention to his dating life, or lack of one, until after he graduated from high school and briefly joined a student group on campus, met people, and brought a date home. There was a brief flurry of interest and support from his parents over his newly activated gay identity. His father the surgeon and his mother the bank manager got along famously with Zack, an aspiring entrepreneur. Clearly, they hoped he would be a good influence—that Auren would finally choose a lane, get some direction, lose weight, join a gym, maybe make some cool friends who owned art galleries or did CrossFit. But when he showed no signs of turning into anyone different from his usual self, his parents once again gazed at Drew sadly, as if he was a home improvement project that never quite worked out.

  Zack had never really broken up with him. They had just parted company after an awkward evening—a drinks party with faculty and graduate students at the business school. Zack had dressed to impress, and Auren felt happy to be with someone so sharp and confident. Then Zack gate-crashed a group gathered around a celebrity professor. He never even introduced Auren, and the circle eventually closed up, including Zack, leaving Auren to contemplate his tonic and lime while trying to make small talk with a girlfriend who was similarly excluded.

  After the party, Auren made a rare attempt to reach Zack’s heart. “I felt like you ditched me to impress someone more important. It made me feel disrespected,” Auren told him.

  Zack groaned—for a moment, Aurel feared his boyfriend was going to stop the car in the middle of the road and ask him to get out. “Listen, it’s a tough world. If you want respect, you have to go out and get it. I saw an opportunity and grabbed it. If you can’t keep up, that’s on you.”

  Auren texted him the next day. No reply. After a couple of weeks, he saw Zack sitting with someone new in the front row of the lecture section they both attended. Auren caught up with him in the hall afterward.

  “Does this mean we broke up?” Auren asked Zack.

  Zack shook his head without meeting Auren’s eyes. “Dude, we were never a thing.”

  “Apparently being gay is one of the many things I don’t do right,” he told Bear.

  The cat purred and sank prickly claws into Auren’s thigh muscle.

  “Ouch! Stop that. And the worst part of it is…my parents, my roommates, even my stupid ex- (we were a couple, Zack, no matter what you think)…I don’t have a clue what I’m doing.”

  He held the cat up so Bear seemed to stand on his hind legs. Auren made him march to and fro.

  “Look, it’s Puss in Boots, he’s Puss in Boots! Oh, Bear, why can’t you don your magic boots and grant me my wish? Just find me somewhere I can fit in.”

  The cat gave an angry huff, wriggled out of his grasp and jumped to the floor, where he washed himself thoroughly, as if disdainful for Auren’s nonsense.

  “And my best friend is a cat,” Auren said gloomily. “How sick is that?”

  THE NEXT WEEK WAS CHAOTIC. Drew and Ashley sorted through their possessions, leaving stacks and heaps all over the living space, waiting to be bagged and trashed, or boxed for moving. Auren found it hard to settle down to the task of finding somewhere else to live. Whenever he shut himself in his room with the laptop to search, someone would pound on the door, asking for his help in moving furniture or question him about a missing bill.

  The roommates cleaned the refrigerator—Finally! Auren thought—and piled the trash bags on top of the dumpster already full of discards. The next morning, trash was strewn around the woodsy strip behind the condos. Ashley declined to wear rubber gloves and assist, and Auren refused outright, so Drew had to clean it up himself.

  “Auren, you’d better make sure the dumpster lid is shut tight,” Drew declared when he returned inside, as if the problem wasn’t of his own making. “And tell the kids they’d better watch out too, when they get here. I saw the apartment manager out back, and he says a bunch of buildings in the area have had problems. He thinks it’s a bear invasion.”

  Auren scoffed. “Probably just a dog off the leash. Anyway, I won’t be here to tell Ashley’s cousin what to do with his trash. I’m leaving.”

  “Really? Where are you going?”

  But Auren hadn’t worked that out yet.

  When he brought out another bag of trash, Auren looked around the concrete pad behind the parking lot, where the dumpsters stood, surrounded by a chain-link fence. The fence had a gate, but it was almost always left ajar. It was a nuisance to unlock while carrying anything bulky. The dumpster served both the condos and the house next door. Auren noticed that apparently there were people in there, because they had dumped some detritus—packing materials and such. He also noticed footprints in a damp patch at the pad’s edge. They were blurry and hard to read, but he discerned a five-toed pad far too big for a raccoon. The tracks would have been big for a dog, too, unless someone had a Hound of the Baskervilles running around loose. Auren still didn’t believe it was a bear, but he was extra careful not to let his Bear out at night.

  Drew and Ashley didn’t make that easy. They and their friends were constantly in and out the doors, banging them open, slamming them shut, propping them ajar for greater ease in moving boxes. Auren took refuge from the chaos in his room, where he tried to do a little packing of his own. He tried to keep Bear with him, but the cat was adept at escape maneuvers.

  One evening, when welcome silence hinted that Drew and Ashley had gone out, Auren ventured out to find that they had left the back door ajar. Bear was nowhere to be found. Auren searched the apartment, but there was no sign of him. He stuck his head out the back door and called, but Bear didn’t come running. With a knot of anxiety in his stomach, Auren walked out the back door, looking from side to side into the shadows and calling.

  Bear sometimes escaped briefly to stalk birds or mice in the yard, but he always came back. Auren worried that the commotion in the house drove him away for real this time. Auren still didn’t believe in bears, but there were all kinds of creatures in the strip behind the condos: stray dogs, raccoons, maybe even coyotes.

  Auren heard a mew near the dumpsters.

  Relief flooded him, only to be displaced by terror. The mew became a high-pitched yowling and wailing, a cat in distress. Worse still, the cat noises were answered by low-toned snarling and growling, and the clanking of something big rattling the fence. Auren pictured the worst—Bear attacked by a big stray dog, possibly rabid.

  “Come, Bear,” he cried. “Come, kitty!”

  He didn’t want to go near this situation, but he forged on into the semi-darkness. The reality was worse than he’d imagined. Bear huddled on the far side of the fence, his tail and fur fluffed out to twice his normal size. He was wailing and stabbing with an extended paw at a massive dark shape that seemed to have him trapped.

  “Come, Bear! Come, kitty, kitty, kitty!”

  Auren knew the cat could climb the fence and come to him. Perhaps he was too terrified to turn his back on the creature menacing him. It bore furry bulk, round ears, massive paws and big white teeth like on no dog he had ever seen.

  “Oh my god, oh my god, it is a bear,” Auren muttered.

  Yet it didn’t attack the cat, or Auren. A
s he approached, the bear jerked backward, releasing a cry of what sounded like pain. Auren realized why it wasn’t moving. One paw was stuck in the chain-link. The bear yanked again at its tethered paw and whined. It no longer sounded threatening, but Auren was no less terrified. The cat shrank farther into the corner and yowled. Clearly, Bear was not going to save himself, but was insistent that Auren should save him instead. But Auren didn’t know how. Call Animal Control? Who knew what could happen by the time they showed up—if they ever did.

  If he cut the fence and freed the bear, maybe it would run away.

  Bolt cutters, Auren thought.

  But where would he get them?

  Drew probably had some.

  Auren was dashing back toward the house even while telling himself this was a crazy idea. The bear, set free, would probably eat both him and his cat.

  He discovered that Drew had already emptied his closet. Auren tore open box after box in search of tools. Rifling through a mess of cables, rope, plastic containers of nails and screws, pliers, and a hammer, finally he found wire cutters. Thank you, Drew, for once, he thought.

  “I’m coming, Bear,” he called, returning outside.

  Then, he slowed down.

  What kind of insanity was he contemplating? What if the bear went after him as soon as it was free?

  He took a deep breath. With any luck, the bear would run. Or maybe he and his cat could make it to the back door before the bear came around the fence.

  Auren reached toward that killer paw, his hand nearly brushing it as he cut the first wire. That wasn’t quite enough. He had to wrestle the cutters through link after link before the opening was big enough for the creature to jerk its paw free.

  The bear bellowed, Bear wailed, and Auren yelled simultaneously.

  There was a thunderous crashing in the underbrush. The bear fled into the night.

  “Bear, come!” he cried again.

  The cat crouched in place and mewed.

  Auren realized he was going to have to go and get Bear. The last thing he wanted to do was take even one more step toward the direction the bear went, but he forced himself to. He reached out for the cat, but Bear moved backwards, away, tail lashing.