Bears And Dreams

When I am sick, I tend to have pretty vivid dreams. Last night, I dreamt two entire stories - the second one being a sequel to the first. Many of the details have been lost, but some remain clear. I figured before they all were lost, I'd at least put it down for posterity. Here's the opening scene to the sequel:


PROLOGUE

"I think it's eight three three."

The boys were trying to buy a bear using their stepmother's credit card, but having trouble reading the three-digit code on the back.

"It's either eight three three or eight three eight."

"Can't he try them both?" the younger one asked.

"Shut up!" Casey hissed, covering the phone with his right palm and jabbing his brother with the elbow of the same arm.

The older boy removed his hand and spoke again, attempting to sound as adult and collected as the fictional Game Preserve Director he was purporting to be.

"Y'know, my wife... she's constantly taking this thing in and out of her purse, using it for everything from jewelry to tampons, it's worn down... Go ahead and try eight three three. Without my reading glasses, that's the best guess I got."

Casey was pleased with himself for thinking to mention tampons. Though he'd recently turned 14, it was the first time he'd ever spoken the word aloud. It had seemed to him a subject that men would joke about to establish camaraderie, and appeared to have worked. The man on the other end had chuckled, made an unintelligible statement of commiseration, and ran the card.

"Looks like we're a go," the broker said. "The card went through, and you're the proud owner of a new black bear. So now if you or someone on your transportation crew want to get ahold of our Distribution Manager, that'd be the way to make arrangements for picking it up."

Casey wrote down the staffer's contact information, thanked the man, and hung up.

"Did we get her?" Mason excitedly asked his brother. "Did it go through?"

"Yeah, it went through, but we don't have her yet. How are we gonna pull off picking her up? It's not like we can glue on some fake mustaches and say, 'Throw her on the back of my bike," y'know? We're only halfway there."

In truth, the boys were nowhere near the halfway point of their journey to rescue Beagan the black bear. Before it was all over, one of the three would find freedom... one would enter manhood... and one would die.