Photo by Benjamin Balázs on Unsplash
It didn’t happen the way he expected it to happen.
No flash of lightning, no roaring, no ripping asunder; he looked at his hands and they were catcher’s mitts, furry catcher’s mitts with claws the color of spring-turned dirt. He looked around, expecting woods, but saw instead a blue hydrangea bush, a maple tree with a tire hanging from a rope, and a woman on a weathered back porch, holding a wooden-handled hatchet in front of her like a shield.
The woman didn’t interest him, but the tire swing did. He tried to hold the rope steady with his massive paws, tried to climb, tried to sink his furry bear butt in the middle of the tire that always whooshed away at the last moment, a conundrum he couldn’t solve. He climbed and spun and bobbed and fell and climbed again, trying to sit in that swing, while bees buzzed gently in his ears, whispered promises of future honey, and a mourning dove asked Who, who are you?, and the woman put down the hatchet and smiled, and the bear knew he was a bear, only and ever a bear, and the swing swung round, and the bear smiled too.
KATHRYN KULPA is a writer, editor, and librarian with stories in BULL, Centaur, Flash Frog, and Moon City Review. She is the author of A MAP OF LOST PLACES (Gold Line Press) and FOR EVERY TOWER, A PRINCESS (Porkbelly Press).
