February 13, 2025
Bearwife
I love my bearwife. I think she’s so sexy. I love her collection of novelty t-shirts. This one says, “I’m the Grandpa, So I Make the Rules.” This other one has a picture of Minnie Mouse, and it says, “Caution: May Contain Attitude.” And this other one, it says, “Eat, Sleep, Regatta, Repeat. Cub Scout Pack 738 Raingutter Regatta Champion 2007.” I think they’re great—I love how my bearwife looks in them. They’re so stupid, but she makes them look so good.
My bearwife, she’s also a vegetarian. She’s always making these fruit smoothies. Every morning I come downstairs, and I see her with the blender I got her for Christmas. I love how small the fruit looks in her hands. The other day she was making a strawberry-banana smoothie, and the way she was holding them, the strawberries looked like pebbles at the bottom of a fish tank. When I hold the strawberries, I feel like a little kid, like they’re these great big things in my hands. But when she holds them, they look so tiny they could just slip out. At night, she’ll hold me with those hands of hers, all warm and soft and fuzzy, and I’ll feel as close to heaven as a woman can feel.
What else about my bearwife? She’s a real monster at Scrabble. She knows so many words. She was an English major in college. She’s read so many things. All those big, heavy books you see people reading in coffee shops. Ulysses. Gravity’s Rainbow. Infinite Jest. She’s read all the classics, all those books you were supposed to read in high school. The Great Gatsby. The Grapes of Wrath. The Catcher in the Rye. But what she really loves, and what she’s always telling me about, are those Discworld books. There are so many of them, I can never keep track. Sometimes, we’ll be reading together in bed, and she’ll read a bit from one of them, and I’ll just burst out laughing. We laugh together all the time, especially when we play Scrabble. But it’s hard sometimes, on account of her hands—hard to pick up the Scrabble tiles.
People can be so unkind to my bearwife and I. We had thought that people would be kinder to us up north, in Tanglewylde, than that backwater Leech Creek, where we were living before. Not so. I remember this one time, when my bearwife and I were out running errands, this man came up to us on the street. He was a younger man, about the same age as we were then. He had these hollow, yellow eyes, and wore a huge, black trench coat, which I thought was odd for May, and must have been very uncomfortable. His hair was cropped short, and I could see the tips of an ornate tattoo that seemed to stretch across his shoulders and up his neck. He looked as though he had not shaved for many days. And he was white—pale white, ghostly even.
This is what he said to us:
“Freak of nature! Monster! Monster! Beast, that’s what you are! Nothing but a grizzly freak of nature. And you! Sinner! Animal fucker! You furry fucking pervert! Dykes, the both of you! Big, hairy dykes!”
My bearwife and I were obviously appalled. How could anybody, a neighbor of ours no less, be so cruel? Didn’t he know where he was? What part of the country he was in? What year it was? He continued:
“That’s right, you heard me! You’re evil. You’re going to Hell someday. God hates you. I bet you fuck kids, too. I bet you rape kids, don’t you? Vile! You make me sick.”
I should mention at this point that I, being a high school guidance counselor, have a certain amount of experience when it comes to dealing with bullies. “Pay it no mind,” I tell my students. “Tune it out, and keep being yourself. Sticks and stones,” et cetera. But my bearwife, God bless her, she’s a firefighter. She was the first out gay firefighter in Tanglewylde, the second bear firefighter. And firefighters, they pride themselves on their dignity, and conduct their affairs by a certain code of honor. That is to say, they are not too keen on insults.
So when the man doubled down on the horrible things he said, my bearwife did not hesitate, striking him with her big, beautiful, razor-sharp hands, drawing blood from his head, and killing him instantly.
I shrieked. My bearwife shrieked. We were a pair of shrieking banshees. Nothing like this had ever happened to us before. On a quiet little side street, the sort you might expect to see a model train running past, was a woman and her bearwife, shrieking beside the body of a man collapsed in a pool of blood. Not a soul had passed our way while the man was still upright, of course, whether by plain cruel luck or by some other, secret cruelty. Yet now it seemed as if half the town had been just around the corner, waiting for the right moment to step in and figure out what exactly was the matter.
But we’re smart. We’re quick on our feet, most of all when we’re together. So we made as if—I say we, but really it was my bearwife’s idea—we made as if it had all been a terrible accident. That it had come out of nowhere, whatever it was that struck this man down. That the situation was dire; that we feared for his health. And that, being good citizens, it was now our duty to rush this brave soul to the county hospital, where he could receive the proper attention.
My bearwife acted out her part beautifully. But as we hoisted the man over our shoulders, and carried him down the street to our car, I became increasingly convinced that I had failed her. That in my frazzled state I had turned into a kind of soap star, hamming up our crisis and leaving some in our audience unconvinced. All that I could think to do was to see it through to the end, wailing, distressed, loudly begging God to please, please spare this man’s life.
So we drove the man home, emptied him out of the back of our car, and left him until dusk on the floor of our garage.
If I had my way, I would have spent the rest of the afternoon fretting and pacing. But my bearwife, bless her, she did all that she could to set my mind at ease. We drank smoothies while we listened to the radio; she ran us a bath, and read her Discworld books out loud in bed. And as the sun sank into the pines, and my bearwife held me in her arms, I felt, as bundled up in fear as I was, through all my many layers of worry, that because this woman was in my life, nothing really bad could ever happen to us.
Dusk soon fell. By this point there was nothing left inside of us save for the quiet pulse of adrenaline. Dressed all in black, we carried the man, now reduced to a kind of limp knot, across the yard to the edge of the woods, to a too-small hole where we had wanted to plant a nannyberry bush. There we dumped him, and with the sharp ends of our shovels, through the white plastic veil of a trash bag, his second skin, we jumbled up his body and jammed it into place. And over his head at last we planted our bush.
Nervously, we managed to get on with our lives. We’d always been private people, both of us introverts, and having only moved to Tanglewylde recently, at that time we had not yet made any real friends who might have otherwise noticed that something was amiss. Soon enough that man who once so tormented us became like an old stain on a favorite shirt, ignored for the sake of our own private happiness.
You can imagine our horror, then, when having just sat down to dinner one late October night, we heard a knock at our door.
They arrived unannounced, without so much as a phone call. They wore flat, humorless faces, and spent no time on pleasantries. They said they were looking for a man with short hair and yellow eyes. He used to volunteer at the Cornerstone Christian non-denominational church, they said. And he was dearly missed by all who knew him: his newlywed wife, his friends from the navy, his coworkers down at the barbershop; as well as his mother, who runs the Women’s Auxiliary of the Tanglewylde Audubon Society, and his father, the Chief of Police.
“We have a witness who claims he was involved in some sort of altercation at the time of his disappearance,” said the shorter one. “Something to do with—I believe the phrase he used was, ‘big hairy dykes.’ Do you know anything about this?”
No, we said. We had never even heard of this man. What a tragedy! What a loss to the community! But no, we didn’t know anything about that.
“Even though?” said the taller one. “Even though the Audubon Society, just last week, paid a visit to the high school for an educational assembly? Even though, as a firefighter, you’ve worked with the Chief, directly or indirectly, on a number of occasions?”
My bearwife explained that we’re quiet people. We keep busy, but we keep to ourselves. And if they were, in fact, accusing us of a crime—a serious crime, no less—that violence was not in our nature.
Even still, the officers had a warrant. So they got to looking—in the basement and in all the closets; in the trunk of our car; in the trash cans outside, and in the compost as well—and found nothing.
Weeks later a winter storm brought them back. They were already in the neighborhood investigating a collapsed fence, when a radio dispatch summoned them at once to the house next door. Our neighbor had been out walking through the woods with his dog. All night it had rained, and all day, too, for a week straight. Each night the ground froze, and each morning it thawed, again and again. With each successive torrent, the ground beneath the nannyberry bush eroded away, until a small pockmark formed about the roots. And it was in this pockmark that our neighbor’s dog discovered a bloated white finger, sprouting like a tuber from the earth.
We were arrested, charged, and sentenced to twenty years for murder. Our faces could be found on the front page of any paper in the state. We were a menace, a national danger, hiding in plain sight. So it was decided, apparently for our own good, that my bearwife and I should be separated. I was allowed to remain in Tanglewylde, at the jail downtown; but because she is a bear, my bearwife was shipped all the way to the special prison in Willoughby Woods. Not a word passed between us those first six months. Every letter I wrote came back with the phrase “Forbidden Correspondence” stamped in red ink. I worried constantly. How would the special guards treat her? Or the other inmates, for that matter? Did the special prison have a library? Were they accommodating of her vegetarian diet?
Her first letter finally came. It was a nervous scrawl. I read it nearly a hundred times over, and cried every single time.
I grew hateful. Our letters were punctuated by long spans of miserable silence, wherein one or both of us would fail to evade the red stamp of the censors. Even those that passed could be lost in delivery, with no record of their having ever existed. In this silence an unfamiliar feeling took hold of me, and I would from time to time speculate that the brutality of prison might have, in some secret irreparable way, stolen my bearwife from me. And if I ever saw her again, I feared it would not be as lovers.
I did all that I could to keep from trouble. My working hours I spent behind a sewing machine, turning yard upon yard of canvas into so many pairs of camouflage pants. My free time was devoted to exercise: jumping rope, running laps, lifting weights; anything to keep my body in motion, and my mind empty. Evenings were the only time I allowed myself to think. I would lie awake in my bed, alone, rehearsing over and over again the steps that led me here, a world apart from my bearwife, before inevitably succumbing to sleep.
Not one of these things made the silence any easier to withstand. But they tempered my worst, most vengeful and violent impulses, and gave me time to make sense of my situation.
Through the winter months, I tried to figure out whether it was the content of our letters that offended the censors, if it was some trick of the language we used, or if it was the mere fact that we wrote at all. I started talking with the other seamstresses, and with the women in my cell block. I asked to read their letters, and offered them my own, and in this way we pieced together all that was and was not allowed. By the following spring, we had in our hands a working censor dictionary, which we shared amongst ourselves.
It was warm again, and a celebratory mood came over the prison. My bearwife and I wrote constantly, in veiled and careful language. And the women who had been my accomplices were now my dearest friends. We worked together, and ate together, and made up any reason we could to be together. I soon found myself being asked to join their softball team.
We called ourselves the Bullets. Our coach was a librarian-turned-terrorist, now beloved grandmother who, as chance would have it, had spent the first half of her life over in Leech Creek. I quickly fell in with her. Over the course of our friendship, she furnished me with the most pleasant conversation, and the most fascinating literature. Because of her tutelage, I began to wonder if my own situation might be the product of factors beyond my immediate control: the colonization of my bearwife’s homeland, the oppression of the female sex, and so on.
As we entered into our third season, it became obvious that the Bullets were good for more than just softball. We had on our team a cat burglar, a locksmith, a mathematician, and a bodybuilder, to name a few. And we cared for each other, more deeply than I had become used to caring for anyone who wasn’t my bearwife. So much so, that with each passing day, the whole business of our being in prison at all felt more and more like an injustice.
One thing led to another. My bearwife, God bless her! When I first proposed the idea to her, I found her entirely receptive, almost eager. Unbeknownst to me, she had been doing some reading of her own, and had subsequently fallen in with her own gang of like-minded so-and-sos.
We would leave on the last day of June, when the Bullets were scheduled to play in the Women’s Correctional Softball World Series, two counties over. We would slip away in the brief window between when our cells unlocked, and when we were meant to board the bus. We would travel through tunnels dug into locker room walls. And once the dawn touched the tops of our heads, we would flee into the wilderness—on foot, over state lines, loose bands running amok in all directions, into a life of freedom.
My bearwife would leave soon after. As I ran south, she ran north, and before long we would meet halfway. On the eve of my escape, I opened one final letter from her. It contained among other things an excerpt from one of her Discworld books, a funny drawing of a t-shirt with Bart Simpson in a prison uniform, and an inky paw print below her signature. I carried it with me through the whole escape, and all through the months that followed.
It would be another year before I saw her again. We went underground, living on the kindness of friends and confidants, moving steadily towards each other, far away from the world we knew: Tanglewylde, Leech Creek, all of it. Until at last—at last! I felt her big, strong hands on me, warm and soft and fuzzy, and knew we would never be apart.
My bearwife and I, we have a sense of humor about the whole thing. Because it’s funny, you know? It’s stupid. It’s all so stupid. All of this, just because I’m a human woman and she’s a bear woman. All because of something so silly. It’s beautiful. Our life is so beautiful. We’re so happy, and so sexy, and so very in love.
What more could you want?
Emma is a writer from Harford County, Maryland. She is a proud music-listener, baseball fan, and transsexual.