By Christopher Mitchell

The Bears

It rained for three straight days. Forecasters across the state were baffled at the sudden surge of barometric pressure from the north, but Oliver was pleased with the amount of rain they received.

As the rains dissipated and the sun emerged to blue skies, the land seemed to spring to life as God did on the third day. The crops were unusually tall by the time May transitioned to June, and by the time harvest season came around, Oliver was practically giving away the corn and soybeans he and Penelope had spent the summer cultivating and caring for.

He showed her how to can preserves. Taught her how to fish and hunt and forage in the woods beyond the property, and as the first leaves began their descent in hues of red, yellow, and orange, he had Penelope lie on their back in the woods, staring at the swaying trees above them for the first time.

“It’s called crown shyness,” he told her, pointing at the way the branches strayed from the path of others nearby, “the trees adapt over time to avoid each other.”

She pursed her lips in thought. “You think,” she asked, “it’s maybe because they learned that being too close would cause them to damage each other?” Penelope’s fingers were interlocked with his, the thumb of her right hand tracing the knuckle of his left pointer finger in small circles.

He propped himself up on an elbow. “You know, that makes more sense than what I thought it might be.”

“And that is?”

“It was,” he corrected, “magnetic polarity.”

She laughed aloud. “Like two magnets pressed together at the positive ends?”

“Don’t laugh!” he said, chuckling. “I read literature, Penelope, not science books.”

She threw leaves at him. “Well, maybe you should fix that.”

“Maybe I should,” he growled playfully and rolled atop her, wrestling with her and tickling her sides until she squealed and Buckshot whinnied nearby.

They looked up to see Buckshot staring at them with deadpan eyes.

“Does he look unimpressed to you?” Oliver asked.

“He looks fed up, is what he looks like,” Penelope answered, standing and walking towards Buckshot. She produced a deep-red apple from her pocket and held it out for the Stallion to eat. He took it happily, crunching and munching while Penelope stroked him in between the eyes. “Aw, I love you too, buddy.”

“Your teeth are gonna rot out of your head, you stubborn old bastard!” Oliver called, stuffing the blanket back in the pack, then placing the wine and the cheese atop it.

“Then I’ll crush it into applesauce for him!” Penelope called over her shoulder, keeping her eyes on the thoroughbred.

It was the first picnic he’d brought her to in the forest. Usually, they stuck to the hills and valleys, but Penelope had grown increasingly inquisitive about where Oliver and Buck would disappear at random intervals throughout the day. He’d been able to dodge the question until she’d followed the trail one day, straight to where he’d lain. He promised one day he’d bring her here, but it was currently somewhere that he kept specifically to himself.

“I hope that’s okay.” He had said to her when she’d discovered him, worried she’d be more inquisitive.

She’d quickly dismissed the request for secrecy. “Sometimes having things that are just ours is the only way we can stay sane.” She’d grabbed his hands and squeezed tightly. “You’ll show me when you’re ready, I know it.”

And he had. He’d been ready for weeks. But Halloween was his favorite holiday, and he wanted a monumental occasion like this to coincide with it. And so, as Halloween slowly approached, he promised her a surprise that would make her happy.

She hadn’t stopped smiling since they’d arrived.

“Ready to head back?” he called to her, cinching the pack shut and throwing it over his shoulder.

“I’ll walk this time.” She replied in answer. He had let her ride Buckshot on the way down.

“Are you kidding me?” He scoffed, walking up. “Buckshot would literally toss me if I made you walk.” He caressed the horse’s ears. “He’s quite the southern gentleman.”

She suddenly became tense. “Southern men aren’t gentlemen, Ollie.”

It was one of the first times she’d spoken of the world outside their farm and Silverspring.

He froze momentarily, letting the straps to the pack on the saddle hang in his hands. Her smile had wilted. He resumed, but slowed both his tying and his words as he asked. “You know about southern gentlemen?”

She kept petting Buckshot, who nuzzled her comfortingly. He waited, hoping for more. Then finally, after recognizing it was a topic she wasn’t ready to discuss, he helped her swing into the saddle, and they departed from the woods.

The land was a mixture of life and death as far as the eye could see. The Big Horns lay like a massive throne behind a landscape dotted with trees still holding on to the last visages of orange and yellow leaves, while others lay completely bare. The bite of cooler weather had slowly descended in the valley, and the wind wormed its way through the thicker layers of Oliver’s clothing and icily caressed his bare skin.

“Ugh!” He shivered. “This cold is awfully handsy.” He let go of the reins and tucked in his shirt.

“Ollie?”

Something in her voice caused him to freeze, blood and all. He looked up to see a mother grizzly and two cubs wandering about a quarter mile up the road from them. They were grazing the hill, where Oliver knew blackberries grew wild.

He’d snuck there as a teenager, when his father was away in town. He loved to pick them and bring them back to the house, where he’d wait for Occam to return smelling like whiskey and loneliness and cheap perfume that screamed of dancers in Earthly Delights. He’d offer them to his father, who would pat his head, say he was a good boy, then disappear into the small bedroom, leaving Oliver to stare at the rafters where a mother once hung in grief.

He shook away the thought and backed up slowly to the rifle holster at the rear of Buckshot’s saddle. He was sure any moment the wind would carry their scent across the distance and straight into the noses of apex predators. He was able to unhitch the clasp and draw the rifle when the mother grizzly perked up, catching their scent.

“Cover your ears.” He said quickly, raising the muzzle in the air and firing when Penelope had plugged her lobes with her hands and fingers.

The shot did what he’d hoped it would do. As the sound reached the animals, Mother Grizzly and Cubs darted to the safety of the nearby wood line.

Oliver waited until the family disappeared deep into the brush in the opposite direction from their direction of travel, then chambered the next round just in case.

“Not often they’re seen down here,” Oliver muttered, “wonder if the troubles up north are bringing them this way.”

He knew their little patch of land was worthless to the north country, but he nevertheless understood how war disrupted ecology.

“Should we go the long way, Ollie?” Penelope’s voice wavered, but the strength in it was returning.

“No, it’s okay.” He assured her, patting her leg. “She won’t risk her babies for a ‘maybe’ meal.” He grabbed up the reins and gave Buckshot a gentle nudge to get going. “Let’s go, big fella.” He reached into the saddlebag nearest him and produced an apple. “Here’s something for being brave.”

They continued in silence for a while, watching the hills pass by in slow motion, the trees performing their own danse macabre, and Oliver thought back to a vintage film where skeletons rose from the grave while a reaper violinist played madly and the dead waltzed and pirouetted in morbid beauty.

“I don’t know if I mentioned I was from Georgia.”

Oliver continued forward, remaining silent. Penelope’s tone told him this was a moment to listen, not speak.

“It’s a small town near the border of Florida.” She continued, sighing heavily. “I won’t bother with the name; you wouldn’t recognize it anyway.” She looked down at the reins in her hands, then back up into the distance beyond. Her eyes said she wasn’t looking at anything there, but into a past she kept locked away.

“I came from a family you might call white trash. Well, not trashy—not really—but we were poor, and I admit a few of my brothers and cousins were…”

She trailed off, and Oliver stayed silent.

She took a deep breath and exhaled quickly. “And my grandfather, well…” she gripped the reins so tight the leather groaned under the strain of it. “I was his favorite…regardless of whether he was mine.”

Oliver understood the inference and felt sick.

“So, I stayed away a lot, jumped from couch to couch and friend’s house to friend’s house, until I somehow ended up in front of Thomas Landon.”

Penelope shivered, and Oliver stopped the horse. “Penelope, you don’t have to—”

She raised her hand to stop him, and he nodded, pulling gently on Buckshot’s bridle to get him going again.

She let out another shaky breath and continued. “He was the son of a lumber industrialist in the town, and I thought he was my ticket out of poverty. He treated me well… at first.” She was shaking now. The cold wasn’t the source. “And he…did things to me that I’m not proud of…but it wasn’t what he did that hurt me the most.” She laughed out loud, in defiance of her memories. “It was the way the people in his life treated the people beneath them. If the ultra-rich are evil, then the tiny kings in tiny towns holding a higher income than the workers they treat as civilized slaves are pure rot. I could handle the beatings and being treated as nothing more than a tool—it wasn’t like I was in love or anything, not really—it was the deception of it all that I couldn’t stomach.”

Oliver stopped them again, but not to interrupt. He turned and faced her, letting her get out what she needed to say while she still had the courage to say it.

“They smiled, and they faked enthusiasm,” she went on, “waiting for the people around them to disappear from the group so they could belittle them and say some of the most awful things you could imagine. They were good Christians in the light of day, but put a drink in front of them and a little bit of insecurity and they would…” She trailed off, looking directly into Oliver’s eyes. It was the first time he’d ever seen hate there. “There wasn’t a single real thing about them… it was all the illusion of southern hospitality…all rot…”

He refused to look away from her pain. She’d told Oliver one of the rawest experiences of her life, and he would not shy away from the horrifying truth of it.

She was broken, too.

And the love he thought was boundless expanded just a bit further through a shared kinship.

“If it’s alright with you, Penelope,” He cut in, when he felt the timing was right and not a moment before, “I’d like to read to you tonight.”

She looked up sharply, emerald eyes flashing against a backdrop of blood-red grief. She wiped the tears from her eyes with the palms of her hands, sniffling. “Are you taking my job away from me, Ollie?”

He didn’t smile. He just continued staring straight into her soul and shook his head. “No, ma’am. This time it’s my job.”

He led her back to the shack and took her in his arms. He carried her to the leather sofa in the study, never once looking away from those beautiful green embers that ignited his very soul. Setting her down gently, he retreated to the shelves, where he opened the glass case holding his mother’s favorite book. Then, delicately lifting it from the monument, he sat back at her feet and began. “Speak Memory...of the cunning hero, the wanderer, blown off course time and again…”

And he read to her. He spoke every word with exactness; with all the love and admiration and pride he could muster for the women who had breathed life back into his mortal coil. He read his mother’s words to her, the verses she’d underlined, her interpretations of passages that had expanded his mind more and more as he grew. And as he reached the moment he’d been waiting for, where he thought the words would resonate most within her, he clasped both of her hands and spoke from memory.

“For a time…I was lost in sorrow…but now the gods have given me a song again.” He kissed her hands as he finished, and willed as much peace and tranquility into her skin as he could muster. He leaned back on his haunches, rubbing her fingers with his thumbs as he went on. “What we’ve endured in our pasts is just that—the past… did you know that our cells do a full turnover about once every seven years?”

Her eyes widened. She had not.

He smiled warmly and continued. “That means, the skin once touched by the undeserving is now nothing more than dust, and a completely new version of you exists. To me, old skin or new, you are something to be valued and treasured, not something to be owned, possessed, or abused.” He tugged lightly on her hands until they were both standing. He looked down at her, tracing lines and curves of her face that he felt he knew better than even his own. And, in as serene a voice as he could muster, he continued. “Your past isn’t something I see when I look at you, Penelope…” he kissed her hands again, then her forehead, then the space where the bridge of the nose meets with brow, and he met her eyes again. “When I look at you, I see forever.”

She broke, and he held her.

And after, when all of the grief she’d been carrying for years fell in drops of saline on polished hardwood, and still looking deep in those beautiful eyes, he picked her up.

And he carried her to their bedroom.