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Bears sleep by day. At night they stay awake to chase away bad dreams. _________ Jesse O'Neil

February in western Virginia is the time of the thaw - the weather becomes finer and warmer and the careless tossings of Winter's wrath become muddy snowmelt on hills and mountains. The trees bristle with their fuzzy buddings over the purple, seductive, poisonous crocuses, who defy death each year by bursting through the ground...and the robin, friend of Man, reappears to hop about the warming soil to feast upon the first, foolishly adventurous worms, to feed his chicks which will hatch from blue eggs in cozy nests. He and his bird fellows begin their return, and they sing of things to come - victories to be won, defeats to be endured, disasters to impend and fortunes to be made. This month is full of bloom and revitalization, and the birds take notice. They tell each other what the rest of the year might hold. It is the time of passions to reignite, it is the time for vows to be made and to greet the year that is still new and still fresh with renewed promise. In other times and other places this was the season of the feudal lord and his loyal paladins sallying forth to battle foes - of the samurai on horseback with his yumi, to defend honor and emperor. Proserpina will be reunited with her mother, the seasons will change, the promise of the rebirth of the Sun is nearly come, sumer is icumen in. Yet as Father Winter lies a-dying, he is not slain. The skies at sunset still say the equinoctial days are yet to be - the hues of pink and sanguine that hurt the eye because their beauty is so pure, the liquid emulsions of Saint Valentine's own heart spewing across the sky. Now is the time that the bears stir from their caves and lumber out to end their interregnum over the hills and the forests and the streams and retake their rightful place as monarchs and rulers. For a bear is a king - his wife is fearless, peerless queen, his cubs little princes. The mountaineer and the hunter know his place in the domain of the bear and will hold fast their guard against them - their pelts make peerless capes and clothing and their meat will feed a family for months from only one kill, but he is a fearsome adversary, he will not be felled easily like the squirrel or the fox. Long ago in the cosmology of the Medieval European was it assumed that bears - brown, bruin, not his smaller black cousin venerated and feared in Appalachia or the horrid grizzled ghost that stalks the Yukon - were the smartest and most intelligent of the beasts in the wild, and also the closest to Man himself for behold, does he stand on his hindlegs like Man, does he protect his cubs like Man, too. Perhaps that, more so than the startling sight of a furry animal daring to adopt a manlike pose, is what moved the scribes as they illuminated their manuscripts and bestiaries. Out here in Roanoke there are several places where the bears still lumber, watching their strange, naked, furless counterparts with knowing and wary eyes from their safe places of woods and cave - this time of year in the area called Back Creek, down a little ways out of town, approaching Bent Mountain, as the weather warms, one watches for them. They are not foolish, these bears, nor do they relish being around Man...sometimes it is Man that is foolish, and the confrontation between the two results in unutterable tragedy. Sometimes - sometimes it is just convenient enough to believe that. Some years ago there was a lad of eighteen, named Theodore Taylour Godwinson, always going by his middle name, who was the nephew of a prominent lawyer who had his enormous estate in the Back Creek area, and who was found murdered and mauled by such a bear one awful evening. That same night, the night of Valentine's Day, actually, Taylour himself vanished for good, and some months later was declared legally dead, only a few weeks before he would have graduated from Hidden Valley High School - there was a case like it in neighboring Franklin County about a year and a half later, also with a young man of eighteen, named Daniel Hodges, and also with no resolution, which deeply shook both of these tightknit communities. At the time it was theorized Taylour had stepped out of his house to take a nightly walk, as he liked to do, leaving the door open for the bear to accidentally enter - the bear had done him in first, then his uncle, but such a violent bear as the Commonwealth had ever seen was never found, so it was a guess as good as the next person's. Sometimes people just go missing - just like sometimes people meet bad ends at the claws of wild animals. Taylour was swallowed into the darkness of the hills, one with these places that are pristine because they are jagged and wooded and unruly, where the gorgeous February sunsets yield to a sky much darker, where the glorious Byzantine-purple light of Downtown Roanoke is much farther off. In Back Creek, out in the country like this, one is always under the stars, it might as well always be night, a dusk that always aches. One burns by them as Saint Valentine burned for his beloved. The night his uncle was killed, Taylour was doing what he usually did on nights when the cold was retreating and he could sit outside again - sitting on the grass, watching the sky. This time in February he could still find Orion easy - there were three jewels in his belt. If he laid all the way back in the grass he could find his favorite constellation, Ursa Major, the Great Bear, with the Big Dipper inside it...and from there Polaris, the North Star, inside the Little Bear, which - using his finger - he could take the arc to Arcturus, that was related to bears too, he'd read it was Greek for bear-guardian. Taylour liked bears. Some said he looked like a bear, if he were an animal a bear would suit him best - he was modestly hairy for his age already, and while he wasn't freakishly tall, maybe six foot four at best, he had strong shoulders, bulging biceps from dedicated workouts, and a quiet, gentle demeanor that turned ferocious and intimating on a dime when he wrestled or, in the Fall, when he played football. He had weird-looking hair - thick, making crazy shapes every time he woke up, it was blackish in places but brownish in others, uneven, near streaks or spots but mixed in, together, and he always kept it shaggy because he liked the feeling of being to rub his hand through it, so it gave the impression of being multicolored, never looking quite the same day to day. When he was in the zone with whatever sport he was playing he gave off the appearance of being something really more than human - his eyes would go dead and would obtain a focus so complete people in front of him would, for no real reason, get frightened. It was like they were about to be charged by something big and unstoppable - like a bear. His daddy called him Honeybear when he was still living, before he was killed in that hunting accident and left him in the care of his uncle - Larry E. Godwinson, Esq., The Man You Can Trust, law offices Roanoke, billboards in Salem, Vinton, the New River Valley. He missed his dad all the time, a constant pain he kept inside him that never abated day after day, all these years. His big interest in astronomy - in reading - was because of his dad. He'd learnt how to find all the stars when they'd go out to Smith Mountain Lake together - he'd actually learnt how to read with him, and he remembered like it was only hours ago sitting on his lap, the rocking chair creaking in time beneath them: Brown bear, brown bear! What do you see? I see you daddy! I see you! The memory pressed against his heart and slammed him in the stomach. He ran his hand over his face - a little warm, a little clammy in the cool of the evening, he knew he shouldn't think about the past, about the trauma, every time he did he made him feel weird and sick. He shut his eyes for a moment, turned and spat into the grass. In another life he would have been a warrior monk who would dedicate himself to something unselfishly but for his own sake, some greater purpose, a Teutonic Knight fighting infidels under the unfurling auroras - helfen, wehren, heilen - he could forget his past and break with it to make his body and mind a more fitting masterpiece for the better good of his neighbors. Not - as he was - always tormented, always tapped on the shoulder, by his memories, the phantasms of how he had grown up. Having undiagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder when you barely done getting hair on your balls was a Hell of a thing. It had gotten especially bad lately, some malaise Taylour felt settle into him that he recognized but did not know the name of, coming and going ever since he hit puberty - he never figured out just what it was. It was good, then, that his uncle never talked to him anymore, other than those gruff words of hello, goodbye - there was never a chance for awkward one-on-one interaction together, because they never shared a holiday, really, unless being dragged to public banquets thrown by his law firm counted. For the past some-odd years - after it became apparent what puberty was doing for Taylour, how he could defend himself - it was like Taylour was living at a hotel rather than a house, or maybe his uncle was his roomie instead of his caregiver, they never shared meals but food was always plentiful, they never discussed money but the lights were always on. Just as fucking well. His uncle was a devil, a walking piece of human shit but nobody would ever believe it, that round, friendly-looking man on the billboards and bus benches that had amassed such huge fortune and prestige in the Roanoke Valley, that ran local commercials and made love to the camera talking about how much he cared about malpractice and accident victims during the Super Bowl_and donated all that money to the local homeless shelters and food banks and was planning on running for Congress because everyone would vote for him and never know or ever believe he was a child rapist who told Taylour every morning in elementary school his mother deserved to die like the whore she'd been. When people asked Taylour what he was like - it was like being the weatherman's kid but a lot worse - he just shrugged. Back in the present, lost in his thoughtlife, the strange, nameless feeling welled up inside him - he shook his head, putting his eyes back up to the stars, feeling it ebb away as he drank in the crystalline light, tossed across the sable sky. He fixed his eyes on Arcturus - _bear guardian - back to Polaris, watchful northward guide, in the Little Bear, and then to the Big Bear. The sky was full of bears. And he was a bear too - here on Earth. Down here, from up there, they watched over him - like his mama and his daddy. He missed his mom as much as he could but it was hard to, she died when he was three, he barely remembered her and he hated himself for it, he wanted to remember someone who, he heard, loved him more than anything. She was known to be an exceptionally strange woman when she was alive, with a soft and gentle voice that would rise to a hysterical pitch if anyone other than her husband would dare touch little baby Theodore Taylour - when Taylour was still quite literally a newborn she had screamed crazy things at the doctors if they tried to get near her and her baby, still bloody from the womb, crazy things that grew rapidly and extremely un_crazy when they contained the words _malpractice_and _lawsuit...the nurses watched in nauseated horror as she cut her own umbilical cord with her teeth, licked the baby clean, held her close to him and refused to give him up until Taylour's dad arrived, Hell-for-leather from Covington. It became a well-known little story amongst the RNs at Lewis-Gale, a little urban legend that would come up in the coziness of after-dinner conversations for some years. Taylour heard it before from older cousins before they had families of their own and lost interest in him...sometimes he thought they were just exaggerating how his mom was but sometimes - like tonight - he believed every word, he knew that deep down something wasn't quite right with his family. He just didn't know what... Now he sighed - that feeling was getting worse - it had faded for a little bit, now it was back. Right or unright, Taylour's mother loved him - while she was alive, everyone agreed, Taylour was her whole world and he was never, not once, out of her sight. She decorated his nursery when they lived in Penn Forest with a bear theme, teddy bears everywhere - sometimes late at night, when the sky that the stars burn in becomes the same color as the floor in a child's eyes when he is rocked to sleep and all the night becomes one warm womb of darkness, he could hear her voice, with its homey Allegheny lilt, singing a strange lullaby. She died of a heart attack, struck dead in their back yard, clutching her chest. He only heard that one time, that horrible, alienating image - it was one time enough to wonder, cynical boy that he had become, if it had been natural. It was left to his dad, to raise him... ...and there were no words, no real words, to try to describe what Taylour's father meant to him. He could try: tired clichés he could use in essays like hero and best friend - something that could be put in Earthly terms, something that could ground a love so pure and complete, that clawed like a...like a bear chasing lightning bugs... Taylour caught his breath - suddenly, there was no grass beneath him to hold him down, no February sky with the dying late Winter constellations to keep him in the gravity of the Earth, time could dilate and let him be young, so he was six again, somewhere out near Bedford because his dad had a boat, and he was in a field, his dad watching him chase lightning bugs. He brought them over to his dad and his dad picked him up and the whoosh of the loss of being tied to the planet itself made him feel invincible - the little phosphorescent creatures crawled from his smooth, inexperienced hands, paws, to his dad's big, strong ones. _ Is the firefly lonely, Daddy? Like in the book we read?_ Not as long as it remembers you and me, Honeybear. Taylour had no mother so Taylour's father had to be both - his vision, his life, was filled with this man, so big and so strong, he could do anything, he would_do anything, for his little cub, his little Honeybear, kiss away all the pain, hoist him on his shoulders to show him the whole Zodiac above him: _and there's Polaris, you can always follow it home, but if you want, you can take the arc - to Arcturus... The memories retreated like the black, light-studded tide, how the ocean supposedly looked at nighttime though Taylour had never seen it, how the lakewater out near Moneta appeared, though, when his dad had taken Taylour to see it. This immaculate father-son bond - this peace, this joy, this brotherhood... ...so he had gone from - that - to his father's brother, who was lukewarm to him at his very best, cold on his average, an abusive fiend on the regular. Taylour was back in the present time - it was February and there were no lightning bugs - the stars, in their place, burned above him and he turn burned by them. It was time to go back inside - the weird feeling he could feel coming into critical mass, he wanted to be inside if it meant he needed to puke or something. He started off for his uncle's estate, the rambling building that, like Larry Godwinson, Esq., himself, had no real center and no sense of taste - a hodgepodge of things that were simultaneously, improbably, both ostentatious and hollow. Behind the public façade of the smiling lawyer - The Man You Can Trust - was someone that was deeply damaged and never learned how to truly love someone without using them. There were other men that Taylour read about that reminded him of his uncle - kings, men of business - but these other men in history, to a one, had someone, male or female, who humanized them with their friendship or romance...some of them went crazy without them, forever changed for the worse because of their loss. _ Like Taylour went crazy without his dad_. He stopped, just for a second, gritted his teeth, shook his head hard, powered through the moment, kept walking back to his uncle's house - not now, not now... He went back to thinking about his uncle - Taylour didn't believe his uncle even knew how to be sad about someone else...not just a lack of empathy but seeming like empathy was an untranslatable word from an alien language. Taylour had never known someone he could really trust, someone he could really love or talk to - so he didn't, he spent all his time lifting weights, reading old books, studying astronomy. He could have been a jock, but he wasn't - and if it weren't for his natural talents at sports he would have been something else: a strange kid, a loner, someone the school administration with their Stepfordian lock-step paranoia about school shootings, mental health, the endless debates about what to do with kids who didn't fit in monitored in secret to make sure he didn't pull a Cho and go on a rampage one day. Strange kid. A loner. His life could have been a lot worse were he not really good at football and really, really good at wrestling, carrying his school to state three years in a row starting from just being a sophomore...he put off a lot of people, even his own teammates, by not talking much or at all like he did, but a long time ago Coach Kovacs, who was one of the many adults who suspected something was truly dire in Taylour's life but did nothing, had settled the matter by saying Taylour does his talking on the mat. Three championships later there was little doubt Coach Kovacs was telling the truth. Maybe, people thought, he was autistic - maybe he had Asperger's - if only his uncle let him be tested, they'd surely find the truth. Or maybe - but no one was sensitive enough to think this, believe this - his uncle was the root cause of the problem itself, he was already morbidly damaged from having been cruelly tormented by this man, who everyone else, to a one, knew to be a smiling man on television. Now he was back at his uncle's house - he passed through the front door, up the stairs, into the bathroom, all automatic motions, he was barely aware of them he had done them so much. There was a girl in his grade he really liked named Claudia, Claudia Fraticelli, who was very pretty and had red hair and seemed genuinely interested in him because before she had blossomed into the gorgeous girl she became she used be homely, unkempt and - like Taylour - just about friendless. Taylour had wanted to be friends with Claudia - he had wanted to date_Claudia - and he knew that Claudia felt sorry for him because of how lonely he was despite his good looks and great strength...but he also knew his own limitations, his own social awkwardness, that made making friends really hard, and then beyond that, if even she _could get past all that, there was the lasting damage that his uncle had inflicted on him, the longings for his dad that bordered on incest or maybe actually were incest, holy shit where would she even begin? He was going to ask her to prom anyway - he didn't go to any of the dances but he was a senior and he really should, this time. Maybe - maybe she wouldn't be freaked out. ...yeah, right. Taylour's entire existence was a minefield of weirdness and awkwardness and he really would just prefer people not even bother, that way he never had to explain a thing - not about his mother, or how his dad died, or why he hated talking to people and would get shy and nervous at the slightest interaction, why he poured all his free time into lifting weights and reading and studying and never wanted to be home...why his uncle was such an obvious weirdo despite being the most powerful lawyer in their town, Larry E. Godwinson, Esq., The Man You Can Trust, law offices Roanoke, billboards in Salem, Vinton, the New River Valley. His plan was to go to a college far away from Roanoke and his grades and his athletic achievements were such that recruiters from Duke, Notre Dame, had gotten in contact with him, and in the next few months he had lot to mull over before he made the decision - he never discussed it with his uncle. Uncle Larry embarrassed the everloving shit out of him every chance he got: Taylour hated the way his uncle touched him, even in public he could always feel the people stare, or let their looks linger a little too long, how his uncle liked to tickle his neck and pull him into a deep hug, it was really not okay, it was pretty inappropriate, it caused people to whisper and wonder but they could never prove a thing, gossip and rumor is hardly the same thing as evidence, and his uncle was important in the community, he had commercials on television for his law firm, who the fuck would ever believe Taylour if he did say something? He tried it. Once - just once. The worst memory, the genesis of everything bad, but it was okay, he was alone in the bathroom and he could think about it, he could think about it here and wallow in the weird following and get in touch with the inner self that he constantly undertook to purge with study, and at the gym... ...how he only tried to expose his uncle one time, just one time. Three years after his uncle was granted custody, he told the school counselor that this man, who had just expanded his law practice to include being on personal retainer by the mayor of Roanoke himself, liked to diddle his butt when he got angry. So this counselor, who was transferred to another elementary school after that semester - by no fucking coincidence, Taylour realized years later - notified the authorities, and when the police came to investigate, his uncle had convinced them that he, Taylour, was suffering from nightmares, still, because he was only nine - then - and he had repressed memories of the horrible things he and his father used to do. Taylour remembered: the policemen - there were two of them, one young and a trainee and the other older and a veteran who should have fucking known better - nodding sagely, of course, yes, little Taylour should really see a child psychologist, they have one they use who had an office in Salem, he really ought to go, poor thing. And Taylour had screamed at both of them, feeling his one chance to be okay slip away out of his small little paws - to adults it was just a damaged little boy having a fit but no, Taylour could feel it then, the first time, the primal rage that did not have words, the blind, totally inhuman state he would enter when he was desperate or cornered. In an elder and less understanding age he would have been judged bewitched or possessed: how he huffed out weird sounds from his throat, and pawed the ground with his hands and wished as he might wish to keep breathing they could turn into claws. How dare his uncle say those things, his daddy protected him from everything, his daddy loved him, his daddy_never_ touched him like that! _ You'll always be my Honeybear, right son?_ He promised his daddy and a promise was a promise, even to a nine year old. He'd show them. He leapt at the older policeman, his mouth was open and his palms were wide, he would tear this man apart, he would eat him all up. But he was no match for the veteran, he was but a cub, no claws or teeth, a little weakling, and after no struggle at all was he, Taylour, handed back to his uncle - sad-eyed, shaking his head, the veteran cop of twenty years who had never suffered the way Taylour had was so sorry, oh so very sorry, oh the things that people would put a child through, awful, just awful. That night after the policemen left, Taylour's uncle beat him so hard he missed school for two days. Then he raped him - Taylour realized that's what his uncle had done, he was far too young to know the word and know the consequences - until he couldn't sit down without wincing and it hurt to go to the bathroom for a full week. How dare he - how dare Taylour do that, everything he had done for him, little bastard, little piece of shit, what a freak of nature acting like he did, just like your dad who married that inbred hick trash of his stupid whore mother, bunch of worthless nothings, well that's where he came from and that's all you'll ever be Taylour. His uncle tore up his bedsheets when Taylour tried to run away and hide under them, forced himself on him again, and it hurt, it hurt bad, but then it felt good...and the good feeling made Taylour, far, far more than the pain, want to die, want to not live anymore. He cried and cried and cried until his uncle said if he cried anymore he'd do - do something - Taylour forgot, of all the appalling things right then the trauma had reached a climax and had deadened everything that came after. So. That was the last time he tried to tell anyone his uncle was the one, not his daddy, who did bad things to his butt and who, far worse than that, had made sure that all the pictures of him and his dad were hidden away so that he could never find them - all he had, all he would ever have, were memories. The whole town was against him, if need be the whole fucking county, shit why not the whole damn world, gaslighting him, telling them there was no way Larry E. Godwinson, Esq., The Man You Can Trust, law offices Roanoke, billboards in Salem, Vinton, the New River Valley could ever be that much of a devil and live to torture his own nephew because he had hated his sister-in-law, and then his brother, just that much. And Taylour may have been many things, but no way was he a fool. Sometimes - he knew this because his uncle was a lawyer, after all - justice took a long, long time to get served...sometimes it was never served at all. So for now he kept his head down, with all the truth he knew. When he was playing sports he could tap into the just the smallest bit of that blind fury that overtook him that night when he was small - that's partly how he kept the memory of what happened alive - he kept tasting it when he needed to, when he needed to be fearsome and when he needed to charge the memory. It was - himself separating from himself, if he had to put it into words, it was a great feeling, marred with all the unfair bittersweetness inside it, to get in touch with something sharp and savage but noble that lived inside his heart, that he could let loose to be something greater than he could ever be as a human being. That couldn't be normal, could it...? He kept his eyes trained on his reflection, wondering if that weird feeling - linked, related, to that blind rage, he felt - would get worse...then he'd really have to puke. ...then again his whole family was full of just a little bit of freakishness. Whenever he thought about his uncle making up that awful shit about his dad he bristled, he tensed up, so hard it was all he could do but not crush the man's skull with his bare hands - but - but he did remember something a little bizarre, a little off, with him and his dad...something, something faint, about being held close, and a delicious sweetness, and his dad's chest, pressed up to his nose... _ You'll always be my Honeybear, right son? I promise, Daddy - I promise!_ He shook his head - the memory was incomplete, the images too inchoate, so instead he made the conscious decision to remember something else...he held onto it, he gripped it tight, he would never let it go - how his daddy always seemed uncomfortable around his brother, he thought he could hear neighbors saying how his mother when she was still living would get visibly angry whenever Taylour's uncle was anywhere near her. They were the only two people who seemed to know Taylour's uncle was truly a sinister figure but, being dead, they had no say, and so there he was, imprisoned in a cage chased out of solid gold. The entire time these memories played out behind his eyes Taylour had kept on staring at himself in the mirror - his tongue had been searching the inside of his cheek, up on his teeth, nice and white, weirdly whiter than the other kids at school, never had a cavity, never had to see an orthodontist. Taylour's tongue retreated from his cheek - he smiled, then he grimaced. People who would see him would maybe think he had a model's good looks, with his wild hair that was caramel and sable all mixed together, with his body that he attended to with a dedication that belied his young age - yet even with this he was afflicted with a dysmorphia, for he had always wanted teeth, big teeth...to tear them all apart, to eat them all up. Studying his mouth - his teeth were kinda sharper than average, he guessed, he hoped. But not sharp enough. Not sharp enough to slit his uncle's throat, and drink his blood, and even in that monstrous state he so desired and still hallucinated when he got angry, really angry, not a single jury in the world would convict him. He swallowed hard - those were bad thoughts, maybe he really should see a therapist. But... But who would do that to a little boy? Who would gaslight a child and put on a show for the authorities to save his own hide, whose purpose in life was to torture his own flesh and blood because of how deep and how livid his hatred was for his older brother, and his wife, both dead near to two decades? Not a man but Larry E. Godwin, Esq., The Man You Can Trust, law offices Roanoke, billboards in Salem, Vinton, the New River Valley. Call us anytime to speak to an attorney!Area code 540-- Taylour swallowed hard, breathing deep, an unwelcome wave of nausea reappearing. He didn't want to leave the bathroom - not yet, not still while he felt this...weird. Outside of the bathroom was the realization that, all the bears in the stars or night, he was alone, pitifully alone, he would have to take on the world as someone woefully overprepared for it, for no child understands the world better than one who has already been betrayed, than one who has already felt the pain of the lie and the falsehood. The nausea passed, and it passed in a profound way, that was the only way to describe it, vanished where it was, like it never existed, his stomach settling not in a wave or an ebb but a feeling of contented emptiness, like it was, oddly enough, anticipating food, or nourishment. What was left was a galloping surge of energy, small at first, that rose into a jolt that sent Taylour standing straight up with an uncomfortable hyper-awareness of his surroundings... ...and a prickling, tingling feeling in his pecs, centering around his nipples, pleasurable, numbing. It was so sudden, so abrupt, so out of nowhere. Another deep breath - what the fuck was going on with him tonight? He glanced down to where the tingling was centered - the black-brown hair, like that on his head, forming spiral patterns like faraway starry galaxies on his body. The two argumentative, but related feelings inside him - the tastes of the warrior's rage, the discomfort that may have been the post-traumatic stress - were starting to merge. Something was happening. He cupped his breast, feeling a tingling shiver of pleasure as his fingers grazed against it. He tried not to moan, tried to stifle the noise - he tensed up, trying to cease his inwardly flowering desires, but his eyes flew open, and he took his whole hand to press it, squeeze it, tease it, so that exploding from his throat was a new, immodest, broken groan of sheer, newfound pleasure. He squeezed his hard, furry, well-toned pectoral, for whatever reason tonight so ticklishly sensitive. In the mirror, Taylour's eyes locked with those of his reflection - they were wide with surprise. He felt something...wet on, in, his hand. He looked down into his palm. Honey. What had come out of his breasts, out of his shudderingly sensitive nipples - his well-developed pectorals - was honey. _ Will you always be my Honeybear, son? I promise, Daddy - I promise!_ Like a thunderbolt, breaking through his normal walls, usual precautions, of suppression and willful forgetting, he remembered: One day, a bright sunny day in the Summer and nobody was around, Taylour had suckled at his father's nipples even though he was far past the age for weaning, but the fluid he drank, sitting together, naked, the blinds drawn in suburban secrecy and familial safety, was - honey. Many days. When his uncle said that his daddy had done awful things - did he know? Something like this? Something really strange that humans never do - or are even capable of? All the days he had smelled honey, seen honey, even tasted it - shouldn't that have triggered something, something before now? Trembling, Taylour squeezed his nipple again, bringing more of the stuff back up to his mouth. He licked his fingers clean. No - no, this - this was different...he tried to make sense of the difference but it was all happening so quickly, the thoughts, the connections, the memories... As though it were a changed channel on television inside his head, the taste of the honey - his honey - forced him to remember the awfulest part of the first and only time he had tried to turn in his uncle. The threat his uncle had spat him came back, clear, vivid, word for word - why, why now, Taylour couldn't know, but there it began to appear, reappear, coalesce in his mind's eye... _ I'll tell everyone what you really are, you little freak! You and that whore mother of yours - I'll tell everyone what you really are!_ "What...I really am," he repeated, mystified, a fear starting to grip him that made him fidget where he stood, there in the bathroom. He had never been normal - Hell, he'd never been human. The weird way his hair was, how hirsute he was, already - all the discomfort from remembering the past, all the effort he had made in putting it off, was just a way to delay the inevitable, to turn away from this second adolescence. The relatives on his mother's side and those on fathers' avoided him or...or_like that fucking uncle of his, _hated him. Now he understood why. He knew so little about his background, deliberately kept in the dark by his uncle, by his living family - now he understood why that was, too. It all made a terrible kind of sense - leaping logics like one feels in a dream, where the most surreal and outlandish concept need not be ever explained because it is instantaneously basic, understood knowledge. Now Taylour knew everything. His mother was not human - she looked human enough, but she wasn't. The same with his father. And he remembered what he and his father used to do - he absorbed it, all the feelings, something close to incest, the closeness and the utter completeness of love as he was sure he would never again feel with anyone else in his entire life, let them invade his body and then his brain. He remembered - he was not ashamed - he let out a cry of despair, just some of the sorrow he wished he could release, so pent up, built to never feel. Had his father lived, had he fucking lived, Taylour could have one day stopped this charade, this human illusion, he could have dwelt with his father and everything he didn't understand about being a man - being a bear - he could have taught him. _ Bear - bear - bear -_ all his life the clues were all around him but silent, how could he not have figured it out, how could he have been so stupid? But then - he had spent literally half his life suppressing things. It was tonight, and only tonight, that the dam could no longer hold, that it, and maybe Taylour along with it, would burst. _ Brown bear, brown bear! What do you see?_ He answered, himself, for himself, to himself: "I see - I see me." The last word trembled on his lips as though he was not sure what it really meant. He stared at his own reflection as the pieces came together, all the images became a complete story, the curtain parted and the truth revealed unto the world - he saw his eyes downturned and helpless and sad, then get big, narrow, his face screwed up with an anger that words could never coalesce around, the blindness, the sightless fury that he would taste when he needed but had not flooded him this way since...since... He collapsed to the floor, he thrust his arm out to catch the counter but he missed, he smacked into the tile, his mouth open, groaning, moaning, the sounds coming to him natural, unnatural, this exiled prince come into his inheritance. His teeth bared in a stiff rictus, still sticky with the honey he had tasted, but Taylour could not see them - could not see them grow larger in his mouth, bigger, still bigger, until they were a set of fearsome jaws, the jaws he had always wanted. That night when he was just a boy - a cub - he wasn't ready, he wasn't ready then, but dammit to Hell he was ready now, now, he was remembering everything because his body was going to make him remember it, it was going to take him on a new journey whether he wanted to or not. His ears rounded on the edges, blossoming with fur, a swirling mixture of black and brown like his body hair on his chest and belly, which now thickened and softened where it was. His heart pounded, slamming against the bones in his chest...he was sure he was going to die, the feeling of his body separating from his body so painlessly, like a heart attack, a stroke, wracked with spasms, every sinew, every tendon twisting and moving in gruesome ways, tightening, strengthening, hardening...he felt his muscles twist beneath the flesh, growing larger, tauter, his mouth opened and out of his throat came noises he never thought he could make, the terrible baritone of the king of the forest, the creature that made children weep from terror and grown men clutch their guns in dread - the sound of the bear that had dwelt inside him. Honey poured out freely from his nipples as he felt a small little nub of a tail shoot from an elongated tailbone, enclosed in flesh and blooming with fur, as still more of these new peltries exploded from impatient follicles from his elbows down, hairier and hairier until they formed a pelt - his hands grew uncomfortable, gaining brute strength beneath the bare flesh that was swallowed by that same brown-black swirl of new bear's fur. _ _ His fingernails pushed out, hardening, sharpening, into claws, at last - his greatest asset, his deadliest weapons, what he would use for the rest of his life - the palms of his hands and fingers darkened and keratinized, second by second, into pawpads. _ _ At last, it was over - the tremors stopped, his muscles raw, his sight blurry but focusing, this delayed transfiguration into his true form. _ _ Minutes passed as hours, but his new physical strength was matched by an older, inner one, and he forced himself first to sit up right, and then rise. _ _ He stood up. _ _ He was complete. _ Behold, does he stand on his hindlegs like Man_. _ _ His first taste of what his father had given him - what, if he had a son of his own, he would have given him - had awakened him to this: _ _ Manhood. _ Bearhood_. _ _ And as he stood up, as he pressed himself against the bathroom door to gain precarious balance, the first thing he did - the very first act of his new form, of his new life, the consequences of every realization made, every memory recovered - was cry. _ _ He wept, he sobbed, for today, for every day before that where he simply couldn't handle remembering being happy or being miserable, he wept for his mother whose genetics had given him this legacy, but he wept hardest for his father, gone, never to return, who had been allowed into his mother's fold with the promise of love, who had given his son just slivers and grains of the world he wanted him to have. _ _ And who had taken it from him? Who? _ _ Larry E. Godwinson, Esq., The Man You Can Trust. _ _ Taylour huffed, his tears ceasing, his blood pressure rising with an anger that had sat purled and dormant inside him all these years that was itching to incandesce into something powerfully uncontrollable. _ _ Where was he? Where was that son of a bitch? _ _ Taylour crashed out of the bathroom, down one hall, then another, until he came to his uncle's study, the big doors that he would open with a dramatic flourish for Thanksgiving and Christmas - the doors, paired, solid maple, Taylour took by the knobs and ripped backward, so hard that their hinges warped in the frame. _ _ Taylour stood, snorting, his arms sore but ready - here was his uncle, pipe in mouth, serene for the evening, the copacetic capitalist who thought he earned everything, who had not heard his son achieving the bestial enlightenment of the Appalachian ursine warrior because his house was too fucking large for one man to live in. He was startled by his nephew's theatrical entrance - he stood up, back to the wall, eyes wide first with confusion and, then, fear. But what came out of his mouth took Taylour, even in this state, completely offguard. "Finally - happened - you Goddam freak--" He may have said more - he may have revealed more, far more, about who Taylour was, how they had gotten there as nephew and uncle, but the anger, the seething livid fury, it could not be quenched...it would not go unanswered. Taylour answered him with a snort, that menacing breathy trumpet that had been the last thing so many foolish hunters had heard. He charged at his uncle like a battering ram. Panicked, shaking hands ripped open the desk before him, his uncle's grabbing the gun inside, and with no hope of aim, defeated by the terror, the gun, a revolver, went off uselessly, the explosion casting off little stars, burning stars, that disappeared a breath later, but Taylour in this state of hybrid fury could see them appear, then die, every spec of combusted air, so deeply drenched was his brain on new, pure, ursine adrenaline. _ _ Taylour flipped over the desk with his paws, the mightiness he had always desired finally willed into existence - he swiped with a free paw, slapped the gun out of his uncle's clumsy hand, the bullet harmlessly lodging itself into the wall. _ _ The gun fell to the floor - and Larry Godwinson, his camera-ready mug distorted with the primal fear that all humans feel as they see the jaws that master the forests they foolishly felled so long ago, tried to run. _ _ Taylour chased him. _ _ In Medieval times, of course, the scribes who wrote the bestiaries that pondered the mysteries of the bear forever feared the Vikings - A furore Normannorum libera nos, Domine! - for the reputation of the Norseman was well-earned as ravager, pillager, yet so amongst their brethren were they called the berserkrs, those that openly asked their Allfather for glorious death, named for their wearing of bear-pelts. To meet them, so it was said, was to know the Lord early. _ _ And tasting their rage, as Taylour always did - to know nothing but the fury of the Northman that God was so often and so uselessly called upon to stop - was to enter a state of being berserk. _ _ It was a descendant of the Vikings who defeated the Son of Godwin at the Battle of Hastings. _ _ So it was that Taylour, wearing his bear shirt, slew the usurper who stole his rightful prince's crown, from the kingdom of bears that he had been stolen from. _ _ His uncle stumbled, knocking into bookcases that Taylour splintered with his paws, the older man throwing books at him in pathetic self-defense that Taylour shredded in seconds, this clumsy, corpulent oaf's voice reaching a girlish, shrill pitch as he screamed for mercy - he only wanted the chase to stop, and stop it did, he tripped and fell and rolled over to the vengeful creature come to do judgment. _ _ And then his hands were up in supplication, a monk at prayer, as his nephew stood atop him. _ _ And Taylour - smiled - to show his uncle how big his teeth had gotten, he raised his arms to fling his claws outward, he rolled his eyes as his nipples dripped more honey, this transcendently beautiful hybrid freak of nature would be the last fucking thing Larry Godwinson would ever see. _ _ Taylour dove at him, headfirst. _ _ In the glow of bloodlust, in the redness of the vision that overtakes the berserkergang, there is a religious cadence, a cloying towards the holiest of states, where stands no barrier from the earthly and the divine - how unutterably terrible it must be, to experience this immortality as a mortal, to become a pawn of the gods unwitting, unknowing. _ _ Or perhaps - perhaps it was that Taylour knew what guided him, these paws, these claws, tooth and nail - perhaps there were no gods to come down, no spirits to intercede. Only he - only the dark truths of his tribe - as blood splattered the walls, as flesh was torn from bone...as revenge, sweet, cold, was had. _ _ He rent his uncle's bloated body, fattened in glib success and unearned decadence, in ways that a Medieval torturer, who crossed himself when he saw a bruin in the woods but paid no mind to the screams of his fellow man, could only imagine in his most rabid reverie - years and years of rage, allowed to fester in absence of thought, exploding into fresh, sanguine violence. The blood ran down his claws and as they touched his face it dripped, trickled, onto the skin of his cheek. He wiped it - he rubbed it in, and as the coarseness of his pawpads caught the ever-human flesh of his face he felt the sense of power flood him again, the rattling in his lungs of something bigger and more capable having replaced the ones he had been born with. He felt his pecs tingle again, the honey pour out of his tits again, but he did not mind, the sweet smell lightened the heavy iron of blood that had tainted the room - he did not understand its purpose, gumming up the now-thicker hair on his body, but one day he would, he would figure it out, there was time now. In his nightvision he could see: the study was a disaster - books flung and torn apart, pieces of paper in a blind snow, furniture ripped open and their innards of stuffing and springs laid bare. He had not cared where his claws had swung, just so that they could swing - and strike. As its centerpiece was his uncle, a mangled corpse, so he had been a monster in life, so he would be a bloody, gruesome nothing in death. Yet justice would not be served. Taylour had turned, he had become what he truly was, before he knew anything about who his mother was, about any of the secrets that draped his existence - but how can one speak to a daytime shadow when the night falls? He wasn't meant for this...not this life, not this way. But he had lived - he had lived because his daddy had loved him, and gave him the strength to endure the evil that had relentlessly befallen him since. His rage had passed but his body was forever changed, the perfect synthesis of bear and man - he could think clearly, now that his uncle was dead, for maybe the first time in his entire life. Now, he blinked - something had caught his eye, something off and to the side, undisturbed, on the floor, not a foot from his uncle's oozing brain matter. Could it really be...? The picture. He knelt down to pick it up, to make sure. Yes - this picture. The picture he couldn't find, the picture he kept in his head all this time, that he had thought his uncle destroyed out of spite but here it was, it had fallen out of a book, some book, just for him - his daddy was trying to tell him, trying to show him. Now he could see - now he could see just how much he looked like his daddy. He was sitting on his dad's lap and it was sunny and they were on the front lawn of the old house and they were smiling, laughing, he loved him, he loved him so much... ...sons never understand how much their fathers love them. Even in death, through the interstellar blackness of existence, fathers and sons have a connecting cord - not physical, like the motherly umbilical, but invisible, a rope that strangles as much as it saves, because it must kill as it also must let live. Taylour's humanity died that night - so he could be who he always was had been, what he needed to be, when it was too late to save anything left when he was a human. He held the picture in his paws, gingerly, so that the ivory raggedness of the natural weapons he had been gifted would not damage it. A tear welled in his eye and fell, graceless, to the image - plip - over his smiling face, he quickly wiped it away. Gently the photograph went into his palm and his paw closed around it, it would be safe, he would find a safe place for it - a fallen tree, a cave, a safe place - and he could look at it any time he wanted to. His uncle had taken it, it and so much else from him, but now he had gained it back - as he had gained his life back. People - the people he couldn't be around anymore, the people who wouldn't understand the way his daddy loved him, the way his daddy had changed him - would find Uncle Larry, they would find him and they would cry and wonder and scream. They would say how a bear did it - and they'd be right. Taylour turned away from everything - from everything - and he shambled away. I'll always be your honeybear, Daddy. I promise.