The Girl and the Bear

There was a girl in a cabin who would lie on the floor and think of the bear. She would lie under the wool blanket on the red fir planks with her mother’s quilt and a flat brown pillow and she would think of the bear, on the ground, in the lamp-lit park, shackled to a tree. The girl lay on the floor because she had no bed, and she lay in the dark because there was no light, no electricity, no matches to strike. Dark and still, her father asleep, she lay thinking and feeling and remembering the bear, all alone, beneath the moon.