The Bear

By Anne Louise Pepper

You encounter your first real bear a few months after your mother’s funeral when your life is a series of explosions, and calm, and more explosions, and your father has taken you on a backpack trip to help you forget, and you’ve made camp and had dinner and are looking forward to your sleeping bag, but your father wants to see the sunset over the next rise, and he wants you to see it too, and it’s mortifying to argue or complain or refuse, so you don’t though your legs are boiling and raw after the day’s hike, and you’re off-kilter from having carried so much for so long, and, as you start on the trail, barely as wide as your foot, across the hillside of scree, broken with cramped and gnarled pine trees, you have a sinking sense of horror, like when your mother touched your cheek with her slow-moving finger that last time, and the skies outside the hospital were beige with ash and the sun dark-copper from fires in the foothills, and your father is behind you, urging you forward on the trail which is lit amber, and the crags beyond are lavender with alpine glow, and all around you is the smell of decayed granite.

When you see the bear—a slow billow rolling toward you, toes in, lump of a head swaying back and forth—you lock eyes, and you both pause, and your father bumps into you, and you feel his irritation, and then he sees the bear, and then his mouth is hot next to your ear, whispering for you to turn around slowly and do not run, but to walk behind him back to camp, and do not run--it will chase you, and you do as he says, and he tells you don’t look back, but you can’t help yourself, you look back at every turn, and the bear is always coming, toes in, head swaying, watching you, and only when you are within sight of your camp and the scent of your propane stove does it vanish.

You ask your father why you didn’t throw rocks to scare it, or climb up the mountain to go around it, and he tells you bears don’t quit if they want something, they’ll get it, and you’d best get out of the way and hope it’s not you they want, and when you ask what if it was you they want?—he’s too busy cleaning the kitchen area to answer, and the crackle of pine needles under his feet reminds you of fire, but the cool and the shadows and the breeze rolling around the side the mountain make it better somehow.

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Baby Knitter

By Anne Louise Pepper

They say she can make a whole baby in less than a week: she starts on Monday, she’s done by Saturday, and she spends Sunday lazing around. They say she uses only perfectly white yarn—not cream or brown or faint pink. They say she unravels socks for the yarn and uses old hair for stuffing, and she hunches over so no one can see. She finger-knits them (no needles in here) in one continuous piece, arms pinched out (no fingers), legs pinched out (no toes). She makes the heads by pulling yarn around their necks.

They say she was a pediatric nurse; she used a needle then. They say she hunched over so no one could see and picked babies who’d recovered, who were on the edge of leaving—the shift from robust to limp, the alarm, the doctors and nurses racing, the snapped orders, the chirp and bay of machines, the sob after the storm, the hush, the soothing hands on her arms, the way she murmured—This was an act of God—to the parents, the funerals, the dignity.

During the trial, they asked her why. She wept.

They say her babies have no faces. They say when she’s done, she sets the baby on the floor, and, blind, it shuffles to the wall on its stubs and falls.

They say when the other inmates found out who she was, they turned on her: they knocked into her in the showers, slapped her food tray from her hands, poked her with shivs, hissed—Baby Killer!—but she took it all with stoic, righteous grace.

They put her in isolation for her own safety, and, to this day, she’s making babies. She has hundreds of them, a whole congregation, creeping around her in a great swirl, crawling and bowing. She’s never been happier.

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​Anne Louise Pepper is a writer and former educator who lives in the Pacific Northwest. Her work can be found in failbetter and The Citron Review.