Page 8 of Bears Not Included

Blood splatters against the glass. She’s already dead. But the bear isn’t doing this for sport or entertainment. It’s hunger that drives it to tear the human body from limb to limb, devouring and swallowing her skin, bones, and organs.

Still, not so much as a whisper passes over our faces. This makes Yenin exponentially more agitated. He rises from his chair, sits down, and takes another hit of coke. The more unmoved we are, the more restless he becomes.

What does he expect us to do? Ask him not to feed an innocent life to a bear he deliberately starved for this occasion. Upend our guts on our hand-made leather shoes as the sound of her organs being pierced by the bear's canines reaches our ears. Shudder in terror as she’s ripped apart like a piece of paper under his claws?

This man has no idea what we’ve seen. What we’ve done. What we’re capable of doing.

Subjecting us to the sport of the mauling and then the eating of a woman by a possibly diseased animal doesn’t even rank on our scale to elicit shock.

But then again, we don’t even have a scale.

Killing and kinks are the same.

It’s only novel the first time you do it.

Chapter Five

Livia

The bubble of excitement inside of me continues to bloom. I can’t stop smiling even as I check in at The Sweet Haven Lodgers Place, the closest form of civilization to where Secret Hush Valley once stood, and it’s still a two-hour drive away, and god knows how long of a hike.

I do my normal check-ins with my girls at FFF. They’re as excited as I am and completely understand my determination to do this alone.

It’s going to be something cathartic, a therapeutic pilgrimage, and I want it to be mine alone. It’s crazy how relatable we at FFF are, even on different levels. Skyler, Demi, and Kyla all have different reasons for wanting to prove that fairytales, or some elements of the fairytales we know today, are real.

I also check in with Faith as she’s on her way to her shoot, and she’s tracking my live location as well, although I did tell her I might lose connection the deeper into the mountains I go.

With butterflies in my stomach, I don’t waste any more time. I empty my backpack of the clothes I clearly overpacked, then fill it with bottles of water, snacks, and emergency supplies I got from a utility store on my way here. And then I set off.

My car takes me as far as it can before I have to make the rest of the way on foot.

I’m focused and alert. The first part of the journey is fairly straightforward, delineated by an old hiking trail. But then I diverge from the path and ignore the internal signs that tell me I’m off the trail and approaching completely unknown, unventured territory.

From my mom’s journal, I know Barrett Marticus Ursid wrote down their story, everything in detail about it from the very beginning, for Goldenia when she was dying from old age.

Goldenia wanted the pages of her love story to be passed down to her sons. When they were of age, she wanted them to find their little cottage across the sea and preserve it until the end of time.

Goldenia died the very next night after Barrett had written down their story and Bernard, Barrett, and Bruin died of broken hearts within hours of their wife’s death.

A servant of theirs who could read and write, thanks to Goldenia teaching him, had skimmed through their story the night Goldenia died.

Unfortunately, the servant came upon hard times, and with a sick child at home, he produced their story from memory and then sold it to a local publisher.

The money he received was enough to successfully care for his child, but the publisher’s wife declared the story too carnal and fiendish and deemed the servant to be put into an asylum for a severe case of mania after being touched by the devil.

He never once said that the story he wrote had, in fact, happened. He said he imagined it in his mind. In his version, he never wrote down their names. It was just the three bears and their bride. He kept their secrets with him until he died.

He managed to escape with his family before being thrown into the asylum, and traveled to America. My mom said he wanted to find the cottage where the three bears lived.

The publisher’s very pious wife burned the manuscript that the servant had written, but there was still talk about the story itself since a few people had read the manuscript about the three bears and their bride.

A few years later, an author wrote a version for children and replaced Goldenia with an old woman, called Goldi whom the three bears supposedly ate after she broke into their home.

Some versions say Goldi was set alight, doused, and then impaled for trespassing. Then a more tapered version, the version we know now where instead of an old woman it’s a young girl and she just got to run away, is the one that stuck.

I didn’t tell Faith all of this. I haven’t told her about my mom’s journals, the piles and piles of notes she kept in as many boxes, scribbled in a manic frenzy because she was certain my father was going to burn them all if he found out. She also had so many drawings of what she thought the cottage would look like. She was an artist, and her sketches were amazing. But she was never able to discover exactly where it stood.

To anyone else, my mom would have been deemed crazy.

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