May 27, 2025

the charade

Inspired by an article on The Guardian website on May 23, 2025, entitled “Cub found alone now being raised by wildlife staff in bear costumes”

By the sixth month, they’d stopped speaking to each other.
Lunch at the picnic tables, they leaned against the quietude
of their sandwiches and the prickly feeling, between bites,
of the rough grey wood against their palms. When it rained,
they hunched their backs paleolithically and shuffled to the pen
in a thick cloud of stoic purpose. They had a job to do, and no one
could understand how dark that task was, their charge
orphaned and wanting, the thin forest behind the wildlife center
a failed replica of home, and recent budget cuts making a distracted buzz
at weekly staff meetings, where they bit their nails too far and couldn’t
keep their knees from shaking. At home, their spouses noticed
a stiff rise in after-dinner exits to the garage, some nameless project
trapped between the toothless maw of workbench clamps, the radio
tuned to static. No one mentioned counseling. The plans for a summer
road trip drifted away. A birthday passed without the usual
dinner out. The cub struggled to put weight on, kept biting at his own fur,
but through the long plateau, they learned to zip their own backs up,
found strange solace in the hot interior air cloistering them each day.
By spring, they’d stopped drinking coffee, stopped listening to the news,
stopped arguing with their children’s pendular moods. Nights,
they fell into a deep and dreamless sleep, their shoulders flaccid
against the sheets. It wasn’t happiness, any more than a bear
sinking claws into a flopping salmon is happy. But this brief wildness
tethered them – to a past or future, they couldn’t know.
And when the animal showed signs of a withering
interest in the charade, growing restless from their touch, ears cocked
toward some distant, inaudible rustling, they felt freshly anointed,
like new parents having guarded the gates of their brittle hatchling,
watching the first yawn unfold from tender lungs, the mouth a small,
perfect circle drinking in a breath wide as the earth.