Bear Country:Short Fiction from Hobart (Another Literary Journal)
My son’s first word was “panda;” his first sentence: “Look at the bear.” “Panda” was recognizable if a little drawn out, the syllables broken in the wrong place. Paaaaa-nduh. “Look at the bear” sounded more like “lookadubba,” so it took me a minute to decode, especially because he said it while pointing at an illustration of a stuffed kangaroo.
My first reaction to each was pride. He’d said the word at ten months, the sentence at fifteen, neither with any prompting from either my wife or myself. There had been many other words in the months between, some to be expected ─ daddy, mommy, yes, no, hurt ─ others, like hedgehog, helicopter, jaguar, leviathan, a little more of a surprise. But as I closed the book I’d been reading him, the one with the kangaroo, which was actually about various kinds of light ─ streetlamps, lightning bugs, lightning itself ─ I realized that my son’s vocabulary, though impressive, would not help much with anything he was likely to encounter in everyday life, now or in the future.
As I lowered his warm, sleeping body into the crib, I considered how few of the things we’d been reading about, mostly from books my own father and mother had read to me, I’d ever seen in person. I have never, for example, laid eyes on a giant panda. Having only known them through pictures, I don’t have a good idea of a panda’s size. Are they larger, on average, than the bigger dogs? Take St. Bernards. You don’t see them often, either, and never with small rum barrels hanging from their necks, though children’s books depict St. Bernards frequently, and always with the barrel. How many animals in a common alphabetical bestiary had I personally encountered? Camels and elephants and orangutans, yes, but only on trips to the zoo. I doubt I know a single person who has swum with a narwhal or petted a yak. All this is to say nothing of the sentient train engines; the sentient cabooses that use their brakes on steep mountains to save non-sentient engines. I don’t even know if trains have cabooses anymore. I doubt that there ever was, but I know that there never will be another train that, smiling, says, “Chugga-chugga-choo-choo.”
By the time I climbed into bed beside my already-sleeping wife, I was deep into wondering whether the disconnect between what children’s books had led me to expect and what life turned out to be might be at the root of the sense of disappointment that nags at me, as it seems to nag at everyone I come across, whenever I’m not simply crushed under the weight of an overwhelming sadness.
Continue reading here: http://www.hobartpulp.com/web_features/bear-country
If you love Christian’s work, you might like to purchase a copy of his Featherproof release, The Awful Possibilities, at www.featherproof.com
