Bear
Dad was a bear for Halloween. His suit weighed over a hundred pounds, and when we touched him the hair spider-webbed in our candy-sticky hands. Mom sat on the couch, spreading horseradish over her roast beef sandwich. She was enormous, but she couldn't stop eating.
On our new TV, home movies played, but it wasn't us, it was my mother's sister, Laura, who had changed her name to Aura. Mom still called her Laura. She said her sister was a hippy who never wore a bra. In the movie, Aura's family constructed elaborate sand castles on a beach in Maine. They waved in slow motion from a train crossing Ireland. Aura's daughter, Chloe, fed lettuce to a sickly white rat named Issac. Aura's husband, Ed, played the piano, a slow moody song about the moon falling asleep over parked cars and open fields.
"If you could drive a car straight into the sky at one hundred miles an hour," I told Mom. "You'd break gravity in exactly one hour."
I wasn't sure about the math; I just wanted to talk about something.
"Laura acts like a child, but she looks happy here, doesn't she?" Mom asked. "We used to be close. If you saw one of us, the other one was right behind. We were two peas in the pods."
I pulled a candy apple out of my treat bag.
"Can I have this?"
"It's Halloween," Mom said. "Of course you can." She pushed the rewind button on the remote.
"Jimmy," Mom said. "Are you staring at Aunt Laura's boobs?"
"Sort of," I admitted.
"Well, you can't miss them," Mom said. "They're just flopping about like manatees."
"Mom," I said. "Did you know that ten percent of all the people ever born are alive right now?
"Do you make this shit up just to drive me crazy?" Mom asked.
Later that night, after all the trick-or-treaters had gone home, and we'd blown out the candles in the carved pumpkins, Dad sat on the porch, still wearing his bear suit. I sat beside him. Everything seemed quiet, like life before people or even dinosaurs. Mom went to sleep. My sister slept beside her. Someone called Dad on his cell phone, and I heard him whispering in the next room before he went out on the front lawn to talk. I went to the bay window to watch him. The moon made everything look clear and close-up. Dad took off the top half of his bear outfit. He was bald, a bald lumpy man in half a bear suit. He said something to the other person on the telephone. Outside, on the lawn, he turned around to face me. I waved, and he folded his phone into his shirt pocket. He wriggled back into his bear suit and crawled up our porch on all fours, trying to make me laugh. I opened the door for him, and he roared, splayed out like a rug, roaring.
Ekleksographia:
Wave Two
March, 2010
Fiction
Jeff Landon
Jeff Landon lives with his family in Richmond, Virginia, and teaches at John Tyler Community College. His stories, online and print, have appeared in Crazyhorse, Another Chicago Magazine, Mississippi Review, Hobart, FRiGG, Smokelong Quarterly, Night Train, Quick Fiction, Phoebe, and other places.