a july ghost story

step out in style

When the train went off the tracks, nobody really thought about the bear. They were busy thinking about other things, like dying. Of course, the monkeys were making a ruckus, so people thought about them. The bear had always been quiet and so even its silence didn’t really stand out. It was only after all the monkeys were dead and the fire department picked through the wreckage that the question of the bear arose. By then, however, it was gone.

If, a moment before the wreck, you’d asked the bear if it was happy or sad, the bear would not really have known the answer. Officially, it was Gloria, the Dancing Bear, and its life before the circus was a distant memory of green shade and misty cold. Sometimes the bear dreamed about these things, but mostly, the bear did not dream. It just did what it was told. The rest of the time, it sat in a cage. Had it been given time, the bear would not, probably, have described its situation in these terms, but the truth was that being a dancing bear in a traveling circus meant being the attraction people settled for when they couldn’t get lions. You could see a bear any time and everybody knew the bear couldn’t really dance.

So the bear did its job and it didn’t cause trouble and it was not happy and it was not sad. It just got through each day. It didn’t want a different life because it would have had to imagine a different life and living as it did it simply did not even consider imagining anything. That was how it was before the wreck. But then the train was on its side and the cage had burst open. At first the bear just sat there, but finally, not knowing what else to do, it walked out. As it emerged past the smoke and the screaming, the bear saw—

Green.

The bear gazed in what might have been wonder. Then, tentatively, it took a step toward the woods. A voice from above said: “Just wait here, they’ll come to fetch us.” That was one of the monkeys, up in the trees. The bear, however, took another step. One step, then another. One step, then another. One step, then another, and then there was only a world of green shade. As if there had never been anything else.

“Stupid bear,” said the monkeys. “But what can you expect? It’s only an Ursidae. Not like one of us.”

Now wait—I can hear you saying. Didn’t you say the monkeys all died? They did die. They were shot down out of the trees. There wasn’t enough time to try to coax them down and they were too dangerous to let roam free. Maybe a monkey or two lived because it went off into the forest too. You can think that if you prefer. As far as I’m concerned, though, they all died. Good riddance.

In any case, this story is not about the monkeys. And unlike the monkeys, which had each other and strong sense of pride, the bear had no real sense of being a bear. It had always been the only bear. It ate what it was fed, but it didn’t catch anything.

In the woods, it sensed that it was not going to be that way. The price of living in this dream world was looking after itself. But how? It longed to climb trees, but its claws, front and back, had been clipped to stubs. It tried to catch things to eat, but the clever woodland animals easily escaped, and the bear, having not been raised by other bears, did not know that it could also eat plants if it wanted. In the circus it had just been fed meat. The bear had a lot to learn, but mostly, now the bear was sad. It understood that somehow it fit into these woods, or at least that it could have, but that now, this would never happen. It couldn’t live anywhere except a cage. And though it, having seen this world of woods, did not want to go back to its cage, it also couldn’t. The cage was gone and there wouldn’t be another one.

The bear wandered and wandered through the woods, until it came to a clear blue stream. It laid down alongside the water and felt the misty spray on its muzzle. It looked at the green grass and listened to the water. It closed its eyes and it died.

Then the bear opened its eyes again and sat up. Sitting on the other edge of the stream was a white rabbit.

“I don’t think,” said the bear, slowly, “that I’m supposed to be here.” It looked down at its slumped body. A fly landed on the nose.

“Well,” said the rabbit. “You’re here.”

“But I’m dead,” said the bear.

“We’re all dead,” said the rabbit irritably. “Well, the two of us are dead.” It twitched its nose, and began to explain. “I belonged to a magician. But one day he wasn’t careful in locking my cage and I hopped off. I’m not sure I really meant to leave. I just hopped and then I didn’t know how to hop back. And it’s no good being a white rabbit in a forest, I can tell you. I got eaten two days in. In retrospect, honestly, I’m surprised it took that long.”

The bear said: “I’m not trying to be stupid, but I don’t understand.”

“I know,” said the rabbit. It groomed its whiskers thoughtfully. “It’s like this. Some animals belong to the woods and some belong to people. When they die, they just move on. But animals like you and me are different. Nobody loved us, so we didn’t belong to a person. We couldn’t be wild either. So we get… a window.”

“A window,” said the bear.

“Look at your paws,” said the rabbit. “Don’t you see? Look.”

The bear looked. Growing out of its paws now was a set of sharp and perfect claws.

“We never really got a life,” said the rabbit. “So now you get to have one until the next one comes. Then you’ll explain, like I’m explaining to you. And then you’ll move on.”

“Move on to what?” asked the bear.

“Nobody knows,” said the rabbit. “Not even people.”

“Am I—real?” asked the bear.

“You are as real as you want to be,” said the rabbit.

“Do you have to go?” asked the bear, suddenly anxious.

“Yes,” said the rabbit. And it was gone.

The bear sat by the stream, running its tongue over its teeth. It looked at the dead body on the grass as flies kept landing on it. Then it shook itself and began to walk toward the nearest tree. It was time, at long last, to climb.

---

After the train crash, rumors of a runaway bear lured many teenagers into the woods. They dared each other to find the bear, or they just went there in the hope of finding it and somehow proving themselves. They never found it; they didn’t even find its bleached white bones. In truth, they were mostly pretty drunk when they went out into the woods and it was only luck that kept them from running into any bears at all. Decades went by and the teens kept daring each other to go into the woods, even though at this point everybody knew the bear would have died of a ripe old age. Did you know there’s a dancing bear in the woods? If you find it—

If you find it—

Nobody knew what would happen.

But it’s true. There is the ghost of a dancing bear out there in the woods. It has waited a long time for its successor, but so far, it’s just the bear. It climbs every tree, it catches fish in its claws and feels the twitch and bursting of their bodies in its mouth. It eats berries and it lies in the sun and in the winter, because it is a ghost, it doesn’t hibernate. It makes snow angels and enjoys looking up at the stars, unobscured by the leaves. The bear likes to think about the stars and it has on its own, over the years, discerned the existence of Ursa Major and Ursa Minor. It thinks that perhaps that’s where it will go when it does move on. It thinks the rabbit went to the moon.

And when the moon is full, the bear gets up on its hind legs and it dances. Really dances, I mean. You see, there is a music the full moon and the stars make together that only bears can hear. In fact, if people understood this truth about bears, a dancing bear would become an extraordinary thing to see, since, after all, you could only see it once a month. People would pay lots of money to see real dancing bears. Bears, however—very wisely, in my opinion—never let on. And this bear couldn’t hear the music at the circus because it was always shut away and you can only hear it if you’re free and under the open sky. But now it can.

And if a particularly lucky teenager ever found the dancing bear on the night of the full moon, they would see its furry and ungainly body transformed into something that touched the earth as lightly as the lightest ballerina, but with all the power of the muscles it has built through year after year of its new life. The teenager would watch as the bear leapt and spun and swayed. And that teenager would never tell a soul because when you see something like that, you know that it deserves the honor of your silence. (Teenagers understand this; in their way, they are not unlike bears.) Maybe sometimes, that person would go back in hopes of seeing the bear again. But if anybody ever saw it, they never saw it more than once. That’s how it is with beautiful things.

For the bear, every day is glorious, every night is beautiful, and every full moon, it dances. It dances and dances. One day it will go to the place where bears go and dance with its fellow kind, but for now, alone, it dances. In the freedom and the glory of its body, its coat, its teeth, its claws, it lifts its nose to the moon. And it dances.