The bear-woman came to the crematorium and asked me about her lover, a bear-man who had come in the night before and was heaved up onto the Corian slab, his naked body covered with wiry fur, a mass of reddish brown, which we sheared off and hung up to dry, having an idea that I’d take the fur home, maybe for a rug or winter coat, and when I told the bear-woman we had a bear-man she cried that he had just emerged from their winter den and had staggered off toward the highway, and she had risen from her slumber shortly after, calling after him, worried about the semis heading to Anchorage, and I tried to comfort her, said she could have his ashes in a few days, and she asked to see his body, say goodbye to her lover, which was not going to work out well for me, so I handed her some paperwork, which she studied but then she caught sight of his fur on the coat rack and she rose up, a low growl coming from her widening mouth, and tossed my desk aside, and I cowered on the floor, saying I had kids, so many kids, and a wife, though she had left me a year ago, and we didn’t have any kids, just a dog, a sweet Malamute, who had died, and we had in our sorrow found no solace in each other, and she left, back to her mother in Hooper Bay, and I stayed on, working these shifts in the crematorium where I saw only the worse types of death, and I could hardly stand it anymore, and when the bear-woman grabbed her lover’s fur and slung it over my shoulders, she asked me to always wear it, to say that I was now a bear-man, her bear-man, and so I pulled the fur in tight and said I would go with her.
Christopher Linforth is the author of The Distortions (Orison Books, 2022).