Set your timer for 15 minutes and just write!
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A bear on the lawn
“I can’t help you with that, Angela.”
She was crouched down on the grass, the meticulously cared for grass that was greener than jungle foliage in the rainy season. She was wearing her favorite outfit, cargo short in a beige color and a tank top. Today was Monday in the afternoon so the tank top was red. She had a way of wearing her shirts and tank tops that no one else understood, but there was a rhythm to it. If one cared to look and listen. Afternoons during spring and summer were hotter than the mornings and so deserved both a tank top and in a color that depicted both the seasonal weather and her favorite things that grew in those seasons: strawberries, tomatoes, marigolds and lily of the valleys. But on Thursday she wore long sleeved, gray t-shirts because summer storms many times broke out on Thursdays or were predicted to come on Thursday for the weekend and because it was the day that she was spray the grass or garden or cut the spikiest, thorniest of her plants. Pants had to have pockets and she preferred tan or beige over the blue jean kind because those were too rough and even the stretchy jeans were not to her liking because they were found on models who she knew she didn’t look like and so refused to try and look like them. Shopping with Angela took patience and the ability to ignore the scoffs and stares as she wondered aloud why fat people were wearing clothing meant for skinny people and why someone would spend a lot of money on a dress that wasn’t magic and so couldn’t turn them into the picture of the lady. She would talk incessantly to the cashier about how the perfumes shouldn’t be called fresh because fresh smelled of manure and green tomato plants.
“I can’t do it by myself, Eugene.”
“I’m not dressed for it.”
“Cargo pants are in the middle drawer. You can wear Dan’s t-shirts. They’re in the guest room. But don’t wear blue.”
“Why not?”
She lifted her chin up towards him, squinting her eyes against the sunshine. “It isn’t a water day, Eugene. You’d think you forgot everything.”
“I just came from work, Angela,” he said, not moving except to wiggle his wing-tipped shoes at her.
“You aren’t a lawyer.”
“No. But I am a financial executive and there is a dress code.”
“Yes, the code that only financial people speak.”
“Or people in corporations, more like it.”
“Well,” she said, spreading her arms out as wide as they could go, “I can’t do this alone.”
“You don’t know how to do it at all.”
“Can’t be too hard,” she said with a shrug.
Eugene dropped down to sit on his heels and looked straight into the glossy, dead eyes of a black bear.
“Wonder how he got here.”
“He escaped the zoom.”
“The one in Milton? How?”
Angela shrugged but pointed to a tag the bear had on his ear. He hadn’t noticed it before.
“If you can’t help me, who can?”
“Stuff a bear?”
“I’ve never had a stuffed bear.”
“Because mom was afraid of lice.”
“I know,” she said, pushing her glasses up her nose. She itched the top of her scalp at the thought of lice.
“But this isn’t what anyone is saying when they say ‘stuffed bear’.”
“All the better. I can have what the words actually mean.”
Just then Dan came out, his telephone in hand.
“They say you can’t keep him, Angela,” he said, his angelic face dropping in sadness. “They say he isn’t ours to keep.”
Dan and Angela looked longingly at the dead bear on their meticulously green lawn. Eugene knew that most people would have rolled their eyes but he soaked in the moment. A moment among many moments when he saw the beauty in the simplicity that his sister and her husband lived in. The simplicity of wishing they could keep a bear that wasn’t theirs, and crying silently when told no.