by Aaron Polson
When their dancing was finished, they lumbered into their cages, their great muscles sliding in waves over their bones, chameleon hair brown then black than brown again under the lanterns. They sat with muzzles clamped, staring with their polished bear eyes at one another. Each month a new town, another mass of bleary human faces jeering at them as they trundled about, together, to the delight of the crowd. Night after night, town after town, until they had nearly forgotten their bear-hood.
“Nadia?” Arkady paced for a glimpse of her in her cage, rose on his legs, and leaned against the bars like they were her shoulders. Human voices and laughter sounded in the distance.
“Hey,” he called.
She shifted.
“It’s time. Tonight. While they’re drunk. We’ll do it like we’ve planned. Like they taught us.”
She raised her snout and sniffed the air. “I can’t.”
“Yes,” he growled. “Yes you can. We’ve been practicing, yes?”
She rolled away from him.
“Hey.”
Nothing.
Arkady backed away from the bars and reared to his hind legs. With his forepaws folded across his chest, he began to shake slowly, back and forth. His snout titled toward the sky and opened, his teeth folding back too far until his mouth split and collapsed on either side. A head poked through the opening, a human head. A man’s head with dark hair. The paws fell limp as the man pulled his arms from the bear’s skin. His new fingers freed, Arkady pushed the bear down, sliding his torso, hips, and legs from the ever-widening maw of his former body. Naked and shivering, he regarded his new skin. The remnants of bear melted away.
“See, Nadia? So easy.”
No answer.
Arkady reached through the bars of his cage, cold metal stinging against his naked flesh, and pulled open the latch, a task which the bear found impossible. He padded across to the other cage. “Nadia?”
Her head lifted toward him and her eyes widened. “Oh, Arkady. You were always a quick learner.”
“You’ll come with me. I’ll show you how.”
She shook her head. “I can’t do it. I’ve never been as smart as you.”
His hands fumbled at his sides, fingers twitching. “But—you should come anyway. We’ll hide until you can change.” He touched the cold metal bars. “Stay in the forests.”
“Go alone, Arkady. I’m sick.”
He didn’t move.
The she-bear snarled at him, baring her yellow fangs.
“I won’t leave,” he said despite an unfamiliar, human fear.
She sniffed. “They’ll catch you. Looking silly like that. Naked. You don’t know what they’ll do to you.”
He looked at his new hands. “I needed to work the latch. We can blend in better this way.”
“Just go…now.”
He sank to his haunches, watching through bleary eyes as Nadia’s side rose and fell with her breath. Voices tumbled into tent from without, laughter and boisterous stories. The men of the circus drank themselves into a stupor as they always did the last night in town. He worked the latch on Nadia’s cage and stepped inside. She didn’t move. Arkady swallowed the new, human fear. He brushed the stiff fur of her bear’s coat, feeling the thick, stiff fibers, remembering its warmth as a cub when he wandered through pine boughs in the foothills of the Koryak Mountains. He couldn’t go back, now.
“If this is what you want,” he whispered.
She turned her snout. Bear’s eyes met human. There was a quick nod.
Arkady sat next to Nadia for a long while, and then moved quietly, leaving her cage hanging open and slipping under the tent skirt away from the drunken circus men. He stumbled in his unfamiliar body.
Outside, the moon caught him with its bright face full of blemishes that bear eyes could only imagine. Arkady shivered in the cold, his human body covered with gooseflesh. His eyes gradually dropped to the dark line of trees in the distance, a black-smudge beneath a range of mountains not unlike his precious Koryaks. He patted his upper arms to beat away the chill. The lack of scent on the breeze surprised him, and he wondered if freedom always tasted so empty.
The new Arkady did not hear the sounds behind him, the lumbering footfalls of a great brown bear. He jumped when the paw dropped on his shoulder. But, after he fell to the ground, he saw Nadia’s snout, her eyes. He could recognize those eyes from ten-thousand circus bears.
“Y-you’ve come,” he said.
Nadia pushed close to him, sharing the warmth of her fur.
“I’ll learn,” she said. “For you, Arkady, I’ll learn. You give me hope.”
Chapter 75: Acknowledgements
Stories which originally appeared in Every Day Fiction:
“How to Burn a House”
“Faith”
“Billy Boy”
“Soul Marbles”
“The Sub-Basement”
“Better Lessons”
“To Make Things Right”
“Blue Collar Boys”
“Inked”
“Donuts of the Living Dead”
Stories which originally appeared in Everyday Weirdness:
“Gary Sump’s Hidden City”
“Courtship”
“The Long Contract”
“Bona Fide King of His Realm”
Stories which originally appeared in Flashes in the Dark:
“Communion”
“Fuzzy”
“Bleeding the Trees”
“Daddy’s Touch”
Stories which originally appeared in Northern Haunts:
“The Ox-Cart Man”
“Old Water”
Stories which originally appeared in other venues:
“A Little Bit for Braz” – Eclectic Flash
“Enough” – Necrotic Tissue
“Manning Up” – Misfit Magazine
“Full Count” – Eschatology
“Dinner” – Macabre Cadaver
“Everything in its Place” – 10Flash
“Policy Woes” – Hypersonic Tales
“Different Strings” – Whidbey Island Student Writers’ Choice Award
“Melons” – Alienskin
“The Man in the Hallway” – Blood Moon Rising
“Why Susie McTavish Believes in Angels” – A Flame in the Dark
“Watching the White Blossoms” – The Foliate Oak
“Night Lights” – Niteblade: Nothing to Fear
“Small Magic” (as “The Ballad of Arkady and Nadia”) – 100 Stories for Queensland
Thanks especially to Robert Swartwood and Cate Gardner for several story titles.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Chapter 1: How to Burn a House
Chapter 2: A Little Bit for Braz
Chapter 3: Inheritance
Chapter 4: Gary Sump’s Hidden City
Chapter 5: Enough
Chapter 6: Faith
Chapter 7: Manning Up
Chapter 8: Bad Poetry
Chapter 9: Full Count
Chapter 10: Chaos and the Creative Process
Chapter 11: Billy Boy
Chapter 12: Soul Marbles
Chapter 13: Luck
Chapter 14: Why We Decided to Use a Blender
Chapter 15: Poe’s Basement
Chapter 16: How to Write a Horror Story
Chapter 17: The Sub-basement
Chapter 18: Unchecked Expansion
Chapter 19: Thaw
Chapter 20: Ten Years Late
Chapter 21: The Ox-Cart Man
Chapter 22: Crenshaw’s Gift
Chapter 23: Better Lessons
Chapter 24: Communion
Chapter 25: Busted
Chapter 26: One Up
Chapter 27: Dinner
Chapter 28: Armour-Plated Rooftops*
Chapter 29: Old Water
Chapter 30: Casualties
Chapter 31: Sometimes They Don’t Come Back
Chapter 32: The Thing abou
t a Haunting
Chapter 33: Smoke
Chapter 34: To Make Things Right
Chapter 35: The Revolution
Chapter 36: Fuzzy
Chapter 37: Words Per Minute
Chapter 38: Everything in its Place
Chapter 39: Treats
Chapter 40: Courtship
Chapter 41: Bleeding the Trees
Chapter 42: Quiet Time
Chapter 43: Policy Woes
Chapter 44: Consultation
Chapter 45: Different Strings
Chapter 46: Blue Collar Boys
Chapter 47: Doping
Chapter 48: Little Awful Things
Chapter 49: The Long Contract
Chapter 50: Tending the Garden
Chapter 51: Ergonomic
Chapter 52: Man Bites Man
Chapter 53: Old School
Chapter 54: Tickle, Tickle
Chapter 55: Melons
Chapter 56: Painkillers
Chapter 57: The Date
Chapter 58: Night School
Chapter 59: Why Susie McTavish Believes in Angels
Chapter 60: War is…
Chapter 61: Attrition
Chapter 62: The Man in the Hallway
Chapter 63: Vintage Sunshine
Chapter 64: "How Many Times Do I Have To Tell You That The Dog Ate My Homework, Madonna Spit In My F
Chapter 65: Daddy’s Touch
Chapter 66: The Truth about Rabbits
Chapter 67: Bona Fide King of His Realm
Chapter 68: Watching the White Blossoms
Chapter 69: The Bet
Chapter 70: Night Lights
Chapter 71: Inked
Chapter 72: The Find
Chapter 73: Donuts of the Living Dead
Chapter 74: Small Magic
Chapter 75: Acknowledgements