Warning Signs
In ‘Bear’ by Greg Brown, a big surprise really does await those who go down to the woods today.
We are delighted to share (for every reader that ever there was!) this excerpt from Issue 14, Spring 2017, on sale now until July 6th.
Bear
by Greg Brown
We yawn our way through the ranger’s warning.
“Sure sure,” Dilly says.
“Got it,” I say.
Later, Dilly’s disappeared and I’m staring into a tangle of tree branches and darkness.
The stars in the night sky: glint of teeth.
The teeth are literal teeth: a grizzly bear.
Not a grizzly, it turns out: a woman inside a mechanical bear. She’s studying the effects of predation on the spatial distributions of local ungulates.
“Isn’t the effect pretty obvious?” I ask.
“We only know what we can prove,” she says.
She lets me climb up and sleep beside her inside the bear, which is a pretty cosy affair for two people. No room, I mean, for a futon or kids or antique bookshelves or the other amenities that make domestic life such a rich damn joy. She insists I stick around.
Find out what happens next, in Issue 14, Spring 2017, ON SALE now until July 6th!
Greg Brown is a graduate of the MFA program in Creative Writing at the University of North Carolina-Greensboro. He is a recipient of UBC’s Roy Daniels Memorial Essay Prize. His stories, criticism, and essays in Postscript, Paragon, The RS500, Lenses: Perspectives on Literature, Tate Street, and elsewhere. He teaches at the University of Virginia’s Young Writers Workshop and at the Creative Writing for Children Society of Vancouver. He lives on Vancouver Island and is working on a short story collection. Visit him at gregorydbrown.com.
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