Hawk & Handsaw
Richard Downing
Iced The last polar bear visited our town last night. It was burping up parts of Billy when Big John blew the top part of its head off with one shot from a Browning over and under. Bear landed on top of what was left of Billy. Nice kid. Too bad. Bear went right for the face. That’s what they do. Most of us asked what the bear was doing in town. It’s not like them to just drop in. We figured we hadn’t seen one in a while because we keep the garbage inside. Otherwise the moose have their way with it. Ed slaughtered the dead bear. “No sense letting it go to waste,” he said, and as an afterthought, “Billy would have wanted it that way.” From what I saw of what was left of Billy, he wouldn’t have wanted any part of any of it. Crazy thing about it is he was the one that liked the damned bears. He was always talking about their ice melting, how it was their ice, how they needed it to reach the seals. He’d talk about how we’re all in it together— Interconnected, he’d say. Well he sure was with that bear. Cole Caswell, Fallen
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