The Painting and the Bear

She kneels on the bar floor with two kind men. Together, they sop up the beer her husband poured onto her plate before storming out. With their heads triangled there, she can’t stop herself from telling them about the painting—she bought it earlier that day. Just imagine how it will look in her brand new apartment, with its open floor plan and empty walls. She’ll be moving in soon; imagine its possibility. She’ll just get an air mattress for now, she tells them. Her hastily packed boxes are spilling open everywhere.

She presses her hand into the wet paper and looks up at them. The beer is still spreading over the wood plank floor. Her back aches even now, just thinking about the air mattress, but she would happily lay flat this very moment if she could look up at the open sky. In her painting, in the sky, light comes in and touches the trees. It makes their white trunks look blue against the black night, against the snow, her sunless skin. Her knees on the edge of the puddle, on the edge of the lake. Her hands, wet. It must be warm there, despite the cold. Is it a sunrise or a sunset? There could be anything at all in those trees, she says. But no matter. She looks at their concerned eyes. This is where something both begins and ends.

Yes, she is fine, she tells the crouching men.

She is leaving him; he just doesn’t know it yet.

In the painting, there is a forest, a lake, a mountain, the sky. Snow barely visible in the background. The sun on the horizon. The paint is thick and chunky. The colors bright. They catch her eye as she walks past the gallery. Why today of all days? She walks into the shop without saying a word to him. Of course he doesn’t notice the peeling birch trees, the sun’s cheeky peeking over the rise, the subtle movement in the snow, the width of the space she steps into. If he would have kept walking, she would have been fine with it.

This is where something both begins and ends.

But he does follow her into the gallery and stand in a corner with his arms crossed, sighing loud as she slowly laps the room. She laughs out loud when she sees the price.

They can’t afford the painting. It’s time to leave, he says.

As he disappears out the door, she realizes she hasn’t really looked at his eyes in months, and she doesn’t want to.

She buys the painting and she doesn’t tell him.

In bed that night, she lays next to him on their impossibly white sheets and imagines becoming snow. She breathes into the cold, terrifying possibility around her.

The next morning, they go for a hike just outside the city. They don’t talk about the beer, or the painting, or anything at all. She feels raw. She follows behind him, silent as the birds. The packed dirt of the trail under their feet—now their footsteps are silent too.

What she felt as expansive calm the day before is now a muted fear. She said it out loud. If no one that matters hears her, what does saying something aloud mean? Was saying it aloud what mattered? She doesn’t know. She knows she feels afraid.

She looks at his back up ahead of her, turning the bend, his headphones on, never a glance back. She always imagines him one of two ways: with his back turned, walking away from her, or too close, rushing in.

She is standing still, catching her breath, when a large black blur sweeps in the corner of her vision and climbs a few feet up a tree about thirty feet away. She stares at the face of the black bear and it stares back at her from behind the tree.

She moves closer. In the reflection in the bear’s eyes she can see the sun, the slope of the path where he is walking lifting behind her head, the trees slightly moving in the wind. She can see herself just beginning to appear. Walking towards the bear seems to be the only sensible course of action. Any fear that was in her before is gone from her body now. She leaves her backpack in the centre of the path and walks into the forest.

The bear doesn’t move, only peers down at her as she approaches the tree’s base. In the bear’s eyes, she sees her husband disappear. When he is nowhere to be seen in the thick of trees, she reaches up to the bear with both hands.

The bear reaches out too.

What about my painting, she says as he carries her skyward, his gentle claw on her cheek. She looks up. Snow is falling, but the flakes stop at the canopy. The cold doesn’t reach the ground.