Social Themes
The girl was still there, on a swing, pumping hard, so high the chain slackened before letting her down. Then suddenly she stopped, digging her bare feet into the sand. She kicked herself in circles, tightening the chain until it wouldn't turn anymore. Then for a second she stared across the night between them, right at Zoe, until she let go, spinning into a dark fast blur.
The bear lowers its head. When a dog looks like this, it means you could get bitten. When a bear looks like this, it means you could be lunch. The bear's eyes harden, as if he has lost patience with us. We're on his trail and he wants us off. The bear opens his jaws. Big jaws. Really big teeth. His jaws make a smacking sound.
I whisper, "He's going to eat us."
She began dreaming about him in the dark dream, the one with the endless tunnels, stone walls that slid by cold under her fingertips, invisible because it was too dark to see. Hand outstretched, she would move forward, never knowing if she was progressing toward an exit or if at some point she had turned around and begun moving back toward the place she had come from, a place she could not remember.
We had the top down on our old Le Baron and the sun was beating from a sky that was nothing but blue. It was my mom's turn to drive, so I was stretched out in the passenger seat, watching Saskatchewan slide by, thinking there must be a couple dozen different ways for a guy to kill himself.
One of the great things about Ruth is that she has a moth-flame relationship with catastrophe...Another great thing is that she's really creative, and I'm really pragmatic, so between the two of us we can usually figure something out. I started with the facts. Ruth was pregnant.
