g w e n a challenge.” But she couldn’t help it; the bear was looking directly at her, its eyes honeyed and liquid, and when it stood to peer down at her from a better vantage point, she realized it was male and that he was aroused (she would learn about the baculum only later). Oddly, the sight steadied her. She was familiar with this reaction and, unconsciously, she touched her hand to her hair, lifting it from her neck, the movement loosening the inexpertly tied bandanna so that it fell away and her hair flowed over her shoulders. The bear made a keening noise and fell heavily back down onto his forepaws and took a step toward her. She remembered how the ranger told her to play dead, and she crouched on the ground, wrapping her arms around her head (“Protect your neck, cover those big arteries.”) the way she did in elementary school when she and her classmates bent beneath their insubstantial wooden desks against the vaporizing powers of the atomic bombs. Through slitted eyes she saw his claws arced against the earth of the trail just inches from her nose, registered the hot breath against her face. She squeezed her eyes shut and felt his snout, cool and dry, against her elbow and she braced for the clamp of jaw, the pierce of fang, but he merely nudged her arm away from her head and put his nose to her cheek. She felt it grow moist and thought she must be crying again, but realized it was his tongue, gently cleaning her face, lapping the length of the scratch, touching carefully to the corners of her eyes and lips, flicking away an errant gnat. Then he pressed his head tightly to hers and held it there a long minute as she breathed in his musky scent, withdrawing so quietly that it was some moments before she realized he was truly gone. She stood slowly, unfolding her limbs as though they were strange to her. The sun drenched her in warmth, but
she found herself shivering, noted the chattering noise that at first she thought was a woodpecker, but turned out to be her teeth. She turned slowly, a full circle, but saw nothing. Even the wind had died, and the trees stood like sculptures against the bowl of sky. She had an impulse to wonder if she’d imagined everything, but could not yield to it; there, heading back down the trail the way she had come, were prints sunk into the crumbly earth, big as soup plates, each preceded by a row of deep holes poked by those claws. She moved her
f l o r i o
mouth experimentally, touched her tongue to a hair caught in her lips, and when she pulled it away, she found it both shorter and thicker than her own, like a strand of copper wire. So it had happened. She rolled the hair between her fingers, then shoved it deep into one of the pockets of her cargo pants. From another pocket, she withdrew her cell phone, but it told her, as it had nearly from the moment she had entered the park, that she was out of range of any signal. Her legs trembled, but when she shoved one before her, it worked, and so
Midway By Hayden Saunier The two-headed pig was jammed into a jar so I couldn’t tell it from the cat with two bodies or the cloven-hoofed devil baby discovered dead in a dumpster in New Jersey but Snake Girl was alive— no arms, no legs, no bones in her body. The word illusion floated, pale grey, like a misty ocean underneath her name, but I was distracted by two men hosing down the world’s smallest horse so I only remembered that later. Snake Girl was alive, a woman in her twenties, her head stuck through a hole in a fake table and wound around with perfect fake snake coils. She wore her hair in bangs and flicked her eyes from side to side but mostly she looked tired. I asked her how she was, she answered: cold. After that, there wasn’t much to say. I wandered up and down; I couldn’t go. The horse looked like a long-necked, stump-legged dog and I, well, I’d finally figured out I was part of the show. Hayden Saunier’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Rattle, Nimrod, Margie, 5 A.M., Drunken Boat and Philadelphia Stories. Her book of poetry, Tips For Domestic Travel, is due out in Spring 2009 from Black Lawrence Press.
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