by Paula Guran
He has smelt blubber before. When he was younger, still a child but almost grown, a southern right whale had stranded itself on the beach, stranded in the middle of the night. The Pania had grouped offshore of it, wailing, and he could not remember now if he had seen his Pania wailing with them, but he had remembered the smell. The whale had died before the town could refloat it, had lain for some days upon the beach while awaiting its disposal. Karitoki remembered the sweet scent of salt rot, the way it had clung to his clothes when he went to visit, to watch it waste before blessings and the ceremonial karakia, before the body was taken away for stripping and science.
“What will happen to the meat?” Karitoki had asked. “Is it given to the Pania?”
“They’d no more eat it than you would,” he was told.
“Of course we wouldn’t,” says the Pania, when her butter-skin brings him back out of memories and he asks her of her diet. There are many reasons. “We like our food better cold,” she says, as if it’s been sitting on the beach under sunlight for all hours of the day, as if she cannot eat at midnight, eat in the early hours of the morning when the flesh has chilled out of sunlight. “We prefer not to eat carrion,” she says, as if they all don’t eat it, Pania and human both, when the fishing boats come back to harbor and the catch is shared out between them. “Don’t you think it would taste terrible?” she says, as if the meat, rich and dark and oily, would not give her calories for days, would not be tender between the bright carnivorous teeth of her. “We hear them singing, sometimes,” she says, and this is the part Karitoki would like to believe, because if it were true it speaks of loyalty, and he has worked so hard to earn hers and he would like to think that he could keep it.
“There is our duty, also,” says the Pania, a guardian to the last. “And some things just taste better.” She does not eye him as she says this, which would have given him a thrill, of sorts, but stares at the ocean. Karitoki wants to know if she is remembering tastes which are beyond him, but he cannot bring himself to ask. Better, perhaps, if he does not know.
Karitoki brings coconut oil to the ocean. He cooks mussels for the Pania, cooks them with lemongrass and lime, with chili and palm sugar and coconut milk. The Pania is not interested, not remotely, but she is delighted with the fish sauce he adds in careful drops, steals the bottle from him and sucks the sauce gently from it while he sucks sugar from his fingers.
She is not interested in sweetness, he learns. The flavor is unwelcome on her tongue, and she will not let him kiss her while he tastes of palm. Even the scent on his breath disturbs her, and he must keep his mouth shut, breath through his nose, while he spreads the oil down her back. She permits this only because other Pania, in other regions, have told her of coconuts, how they float in the ocean and can be bitten through when nothing but soft fish is available and their jaws are bored with tiny bones.
“I would like to see a coconut,” says the Pania, knowing her home waters are too far south for her desires. Karitoki would bring her one, but when he opens his mouth to offer she wrinkles her nose and slinks back into the water, her own self stinking of oil and sauce.
He does bring her a coconut, and she has never been so animated. He leaves mussels smoking on the beach, and there is not the slightest flutter of mockery as he wears his sandals into the harbor waters. She is too intent for that—scudding the nut across the waves, tossing it up and down, chasing it through the ocean like prey. She throws it to him in games of catch and Karitoki pretends to clumsiness, misses where otherwise he would not, for she is strong in the water and can propel the coconut like cannonballs.
He does not have to pretend long. The Pania’s delighted cries call her kin. Some of the pack ventures into the harbor, and they are better gamesters than he is even if he were paying attention, and with the wet wall of flesh about him he is not. Pania brush up against him, playful, undulating, brushing him with their fins and their fingers, dunking down under the water and bringing up crabs to eat. They twist off the crab legs and offer them to him, giggle behind their hands at his small white teeth, at how he has to suck the meat from the claws instead of crunching them whole.
Pania bring dolphins with them, their fins slicing through the water, and they too are playing with the coconut. Karitoki is stupefied with pleasure, almost, with the flesh and the fins and the frisson of it all, so stunned with sensuality that when the coconut comes his way again he never even sees the throw. When the nut hits him it draws blood, the skin split and seeping.
Instantly the mood is changed. Some of the dolphins have calves with them, and Pania exist to be protective. Blood in the water about their charges raises every lethal instinct in them and they are now less nymph than shark, circling Karitoki and drawing him away from the pod, out to deeper waters where he is less maneuverable than they, and far less swift.
“It’s all right,” he says, hands held above the water and the sea floor falling off beneath him, and the water squeezing his lungs to panic and breathlessness. “It was an accident. I don’t want them. It’s all right!”
The Pania—his Pania—is there as well, circling him closer than all the rest. Her teeth are all on show, and she does not take her eyes off him. None of them take their eyes off him.
“I like cooked food, remember?” he says, reaching out to her in desperation. “Cooked, not raw. I’m not here to hunt your dolphins.”
You were the only one I wanted to hunt, he thinks. You were the only one I wanted to gobble up.
“This is my blood, not theirs,” he says, at the last, and the salt water has not yet sealed the wound. He has his hands over it, pressing down, but red still trickles into the water and the Pania moves closer. It is his blood but it is warm, and in the ocean warm blood is the purview of pods, of whales and dolphins and seals. Of the creatures the Pania are sworn to protect, to nurture above all else. “It’s not theirs!” Karitoki says again, desperate now, for the Pania are not creatures of subtlety and his blood in the water is not his blood. It is only blood, and he is the outsider.
“Warm,” croons the Pania. Her eyes are black and flat, shark eyes. “Warm.”
And then she is on him, and her hair and her flesh smell of smoke and salt and the great white bones of her jaw are opening towards him, nuzzling into his thighs and his side and the thick, fleshy column of his neck, and Karitoki feels her whole body against him. She is cool, cool like the ocean under thermocline, and the oil has washed off her and the heat has washed out. He realizes, then, in the thin space between shock and screaming and the hard, hydra impact of her sisters, that all his dreams are sea foam. There’s no place for her in Napier town, and she’ll never sit with him in the art deco blocks of cafes along Marine Parade and eat her mussels with a spoon, with saffron and spices and sauvignon. He can’t cover her up with butter and oranges, can’t make of her anything other than Pania, a guardian and predator in one.
There are mussels smoking on the beach. He had put them in raw, left the heat and the smoke to open them up while he swam with the Pania and her coconut. He would have made a sauce of parsley and Pernod and tarragon, with the remnants of mussel oil for garnish.
He knows, as her teeth sink into his shoulder, into the raw, massed, mussel-fed flesh of him, that the Pania would never have eaten it.
Octavia Cade is a New Zealand writer who has just finished her PhD in science communication. She kept sane in grad school by baking, hiking, and writing science fiction and fantasy stories. Her short fiction has appeared in Strange Horizons, Apex Magazine, and The Book Smugglers, among others.
Steve Duffy portrays his ursine characters anthropomorphically, but not as fully human surrogates. In his version of “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” the furry trio encounters prejudice and hatred in their attempt to assimilate into 1958 upper-middle-class suburbia. Allegories are well and good, but bruins are not humans and with a story like this, that is wise to remember.
Bears: A Fairy Tale of 1958
Steve Duffy
; They tried so hard, the bear family; really they did. They’d known from the get-go there’d be difficulties, the relocation would have its problems. It’s always worst for the first new family that moves in to a fancy-schmancy neighborhood. But they understood the importance of fitting in. They’d told themselves, they’d said to each other: well, if we just keep our heads down, try to get along, then you know, maybe folks will meet us halfway. You can’t expect them to change their ways overnight just to suit us. We need to work at it, be ambassadors. Be a credit to the species, hold our heads up high. So that’s just what they did—they put everything they had into it, but it still wasn’t enough. That was the hard part.
From the very first—when the slick realtor had showed them round the house in that faux-friendly, glad-handing way—they’d had misgivings. Mama Bear hated how he looked at her, the way he hardly even bothered to disguise his frequent glances at her heavy low-slung pelvis—as if he could see right through the summery, ill-fitting dress she’d worn specially for the occasion. She felt shamed and exposed; felt all the indignity of the collar and muzzle, the tug of his hand on the chain.
“Get a load of those features,” he’d said, leaning in the kitchen doorway, tilting his hat back on his head the better to watch her as she tried to make sense of convection oven, E-Z-Kleen range hood, griddle, rotisserie. “Just makes you hungry as a hunter, doesn’t it?” He was chewing a stick of gum he hadn’t bothered to remove since they’d arrived. She could see it now as he worked it between his teeth. It reminded her of a plump gray maggot, the kind you’d find beneath a chunk of dead wood.
Later, in the front room, her heart had felt as heavy as the sleep of hibernation, watching Papa Bear as he nodded his great dense head gravely and earnestly, narrowing his tiny eyes in a show of acumen while Mr. Traynor skimmed over the various clauses of the contract, flicking through the papers haphazardly, not even pretending to explain. When the realtor’s pen was extended he grappled it determinedly between his callused pads and made his mark. She never forgot the way he looked when glancing up from the contract, proud of the step he’d just taken and yet filled with unassuagable doubts. “That’s fine, that’s fine,” said Jack Traynor, cramming everything into his inside jacket pocket and backing out the door. “You folks are making the right decision, that’s for sure.” He couldn’t wait to get out of there and bank their check.
The first night after the move she could hardly sleep. Midnight came and went, and one a.m., and she was still at the window, gazing over the way at the fine landscaped gardens of their neighbors. Goodness, but those monkey-puzzle trees in the Lockes’ arboretum would be so hard to climb . . . she stopped herself. For shame. She’d already disgraced herself in front of the Lockes, earlier in the day.
Baby had been sent off to play while the grown-ups emptied the furniture van. He’d gone exploring, and a few hours later, after much hollering and head-scratching, she’d found him over in the garden of their nearest neighbors—the Lockes, a charming couple, simply exquisite. They had trees all round the side of the house, Scotch pines, trained willows and those amazing monkey-puzzles, and Baby was in his element, as was all too clear. When she finally tracked him down under the pines he’d just finished Number Two, and was diligently scratching soil over his adorably undersized leaving. “You mind that now,” she’d exclaimed, snatching him up—and pausing, entirely out of habit, to check Baby’s scat. Good, firm texture; he’d always been a healthy tot, and they hoped he’d thrive in such a good area. Without giving it a second thought, Mama leaned down and sniffed deeply, assessing in an instant the state of her son’s digestion: some nibs of corn there still, and a sticky, slightly tarry residue—
“Can we help you?” Several degrees north of glacial. Hurriedly, with a little snort of surprise, Mama straightened up. There they were: tall handsome Kenny Locke who was something in advertising, and his wife Mimi, picture-perfect in what looked like real honest-to-goodness Balenciaga. She was so exquisitely turned out, Mama Bear just couldn’t believe it; one hand poised hip-high like a model from the glossy magazines, the other hovering at her mouth, where she worried between perfect pearly teeth the tip of her kidskin glove.
Mama introduced herself, held out a paw before catching herself and restricting the movement to a hey-neighbor wave. “And this is Baby,” she explained shyly, hoisting him up from off her hip.
“Yes well, it seems Baby’s already made himself known,” said Mimi Locke, with the merest glance at the discreet plug of infant dung there on the close-mown grass beneath her tree. “If in future you could . . .” She left the sentence unfinished: it was difficult to say whether this was out of distaste for the subject of the conversation, or for its object.
Mama Bear couldn’t apologize fast enough or long enough. In the midst of her explanations she scooped up the offending scrap of ordure, then became hyper-aware of it and held it behind her back, then when she turned to lope back across the lawn she didn’t know what to do with it . . . it was all too shaming for words. Most shaming of all, behind her back she heard them, Mimi and Kenny Locke, their murmurs as she retreated:
“Well, I guess it’s true what they say about bears, Meem,” and his rich confident voice sank to a whisper in his wife’s petite ear, rising only at the end of the gag: “. . . but they’ll sure shit in the woods.” Mimi’s tinkling laughter stung like the shards of a flawed crystal glass that shatters in the hand. Later that first evening, upstairs in the bedroom of their new house, Mama Bear cried herself to sleep with that laughter still sounding in her ears.
In the morning there was garbage thrown all over their new lawn, and someone had written in straggly weedkiller letters across the grass GO HOME BRUINS.
After that, how could they ever really feel at home? Each day was sure to bring some fresh humiliation, a new chance to look down at the tightrope and see the void beneath. For Mama, maybe the final straw had been that disastrous afternoon tea at the Minafers. As the ladies of Scotsford chattered and smiled, Mama Bear had perched on the sofa as if on a hotplate, answering questions in strangled monosyllables while contriving to break a modest yet on the whole representative cross-section of her hostess’s best china. “I believe your husband is in show business, Mrs.—ah . . .?” someone had said—the well-meaning yet essentially dimwitted Missy Scrivener—as she bent, blushing to her burning muzzle, to pick up the pieces.
“Why yes, he’s with the circus,” she’d replied, struggling to her feet. It was nothing to be ashamed of. Papa was one of the best-paid performers in his field: he drew down thirty grand a year with Krafft’s, and they’d hibernated in Florida each year now since ’53. How many of these high-toned muckamucks could afford to keep a beach house on the Keys? And yet somewhere behind her back she heard laughter, unsuccessfully smothered.
She swung round, eyeing the rest of the room suspiciously. She saw nothing in the whey-pale powdered faces she could recognize; no hint of fellow-feeling, no shred of empathy. Weren’t these people supposed to understand money? Then why couldn’t they see it was neutral, after all? Bob Minchin sold limousines to people at his Lincoln dealership downtown. Papa Bear rolled atop his log for them in the big top. Who was to say which one of them ought to have bragging rights over the other?
“Oh, now, let me take those,” urged the hostess Mindy Minafer, trying to retrieve the broken cups and plates from her clumsy guest. The sudden movement up close drew an involuntary grunt from Mama Bear—you couldn’t even call it a growl, not really. And the way her claws caught Mindy: that was purely accident. Mindy ought to have known better than to have her hands in there. The hush that fell across the airy sunstruck drawing room was none the less petrified for that.
Soon afterwards, people began making their excuses, drifting away in ones and twos until there was only Mama Bear, bidding a bandaged and thin-lipped Mindy goodbye in the miserable expectation this would turn out to be her first, last and only invite to a Scotsford soiree. Which turned out to be true.
&
nbsp; After that, Mama mostly stayed home, wishing she could be a wife like any other, wishing she had that role at least to fulfill. She dreamed of how it would feel to be one of those cool, classy WASPish brides you saw on TV: to wait each evening with a freshly mixed Martini against her high-powered hubby’s return. But of course Papa didn’t have a regular nine-to-five: work claimed him Easter till Halloween, the everlasting circuit, life on the road. Nothing for it but to hold her head high, and try to carry on the best she could.
Trips out to the shops—though soon enough she grew sick of negotiating the narrow aisles of the supermarket, overturning pyramids of canned goods and toilet tissue at each incautious turn. Walks with her son out to the park, watching from the shade of the plane trees as the rest of the youngsters played shirts-versus-skins baseball. Trying to explain to Baby as he pleaded with her, puzzled, asking why he couldn’t take a turn at bat. In the end whole afternoons and evenings with the blinds drawn, just watching TV, Western shows and daytime soaps and old romantic movies; the hearings of the Senate committee on Ursine Integration, half-a-dozen wrinkled-up old white men barely managing to stay awake while so-called experts pontificated on the kind of problems she faced every day and they would never know, not ever.
When one bright day in June Papa turned up out of the blue, Mama Bear was in her dressing-gown still, though it was half-past three in the afternoon. She hurried out to the sidewalk as his taxi pulled away, but his first words weren’t for her.
“I lay out good money for that gardener, goddamit,” he rumbled, scowling at the scutch grass and wild scallions growing though the unwatered lawn, patchwork turf still evident where the burned-in slur had been removed. Mama tried to explain—the neighbors encouraged their dogs to make dirty on the grass when she wasn’t watching, and anyway the gardener they’d hired hardly ever showed these days—but he waved it away with an angry paw. “Working my ass off so this place can look like some damn pauper shack when I get home . . .” He lurched off inside the house, Mama Bear hurrying after. Across the way, curtains twitched.
