Everything Beautiful

The morning the Bears moved in, I killed a raccoon with my bike. Hit him on the sidewalk outside my house. He looked small, plump, like a wound to the snow in a tiny pool of blood.

My town considered itself to be in spring, but the Storms caused a late winter, the wind still cold enough to freeze your tears. The air hung quiet. No laughing, no church bells, no woodpeckers drilling holes. Fur in my spokes, I pedaled back home. Grabbed mittens, napkins from the cabinet, the thick white ones with curling flowers along the edge. I pedaled back to the coon and mummied him. Little red patches soaked through the napkins like jam, and he smelled rotten and sugary like stale milk.

I kneeled, started to zip the raccoon into my backpack next to my Tupperware container—the raccocoon—but he didn't fit. I heard Mr. Lowe’s screen door smack his house. Mr. Lowe had up and left for Arizona last month, said he could do the silence no more. “The goddamn winters,” he always said.

I looked up. Two bears on Mr. Lowe’s back lawn, dragging branches to the house. Ice formed knots in their coats. The female stopped. Looked up. She was a beautiful thing with a round bottom. That’s what my father called it. Bottom. Her paws could have fit around my little sister Anna’s head, pin-prickled her scalp. Tree bark and breath clouds tumbled from the bear’s mouth, and there I was with this dead thing in my hand, almost as an offering.

Here, I gestured, dinner.

I gave the raccoon’s tail a shake, a clumped pompom. I pulled him out a little more from my backpack. Napkin and blood snagged on my zipper. I held him up for the Bears to see.

“Food,” I said to the Bears, holding the raccoon higher. I edged my knees forward. The raccoon’s head flopped off the side of my hand, his eyes glossy black olives. I was twelve in snow pants and the nearest hospital was a half hour away, depending on the roads. Down the street, my entire town square fit in eight blocks. The only evidence of life, a market with its glowing 24- hour open sign. Inside my mittens, I rubbed my fingers against each other. Knuckles, scab, nails bitten.

The male was already inside Mr. Lowe’s house. The female roared. Her stom- ach caved in as her noise bellowed out. My muscles went spongy. “Here,” I said. “Eat.”

Then the smallest movement. A quick jolt forward, fixed eyes. We both stood on two feet, flashed our teeth.

My father came out onto our front porch. The bear’s head whipped in his direction. I bet he was sweating underneath his Long Johns. My father said my name, Julia. And I threw the raccoon. It flew halfway between me and the bear, landed with one foreleg in a fist by its chest.

I took a few steps backwards, then fled for the porch, ran like a madwoman, mouth open and air-swallowing until my father scooped me up like a gust of wind and carried me into the house.

My father had a collection of silly conspiracies for all the world’s phenomena. Something about hairspray and car exhaust caused the weather to change. I liked how he looked, liked the way he tucked his flannels perfectly into his jeans. At times I mimicked him with a too-big belt. He had an empty space in one glove, a ghost of the finger he lost to the table saw, and his beard stretched behind his ears, gold-flecked and gray.

The next morning I ate paprika-flecked eggs while he spread the paper out before me. “Look at this,” he said. The front page, an article on the decrease in bear hibernation, twelve reported in the Midwest, wandering on no sleep.

“Up all night,” I said, “like you.”

Anna and I had been avoiding him since Mother disappeared. He’d wander the halls at night, crying like the crows used to, staring at the...