I only wanted to hold Birthday Bear and sit quietly while the adults talked, but Aunty Maureen had asked me to show her my new toy. She took the Care Bear from my outstretched hands. “Be careful,” I said “he’s new.” But she didn’t hear me.

“Birthday Bear,” she sang, bouncing and jigging him around up close to her face like a baby. “Birthday Bear! Birthday Bear!”

"Be careful,” I said again, but quieter this time. More to myself: something was telling me not to let on that I cared. Aunty Maureen lifted Birthday Bear up, holding him firmly around his torso; her red painted finger nails pinching his stomach.

I grabbed the air, trying to reach for him back.

Then up towards the ceiling he suddenly flew. Twisting and curling skyward through the air, spinning back down into her hands again like a trapeze artist or tumbling gymnast.

My eyes stayed glued to the soaring yellow sun-ball. He flew high above our heads. And every time he landed, the knot in my stomach tightened and tightened.

Aunty Maureen caught Birthday Bear with one final big swoop and a dip, but instead of passing him back to me, she took ahold of the single piggy-tail curl—his hair—on the top of his head—and started spinning.

Around and around.

“Oh look,” she laughed. “Birthday Bear’s having fun!”

I wanted to laugh like the other adults in the room. Think the same things were funny.

But couldn’t.

Birthday Bear was suffering. Every time his face came around to the front, our eyes locked and I knew his smiling happy bear-face was calling Help!

Birthday Bear hung precariously in the air.

Faster and faster, she spun. I wanted to shout, Stop! Don’t do that. You’ll hurt him. But I feared Aunty Maureen's reply would be: “Oh Becky. You don’t think I’m hurting him—do you? He’s not alive you know!”

But he was alive. He was feeling everything. The same way I was feeling powerless to stop everything. The cruel joke.

“Oh Mum,” Mercedes said walking into the room carrying a tray of sandwiches. “For heaven’s sake—what on earth have you got there?”

Mercedes—Aunty Maureen’s daughter—was my favorite cousin. Even though she was older than me by fifteen years, and an adult, we were still friends.

“It’s a Care Bear,” Aunty Maureen jeered.

“Well, it’s not yours is it Mum?” Mercedes said winking at me. "Give it back to the birthday girl will you and stop teasing?”

Aunty Maureen lowered Birthday Bear.

“Oh goodness,” she mocked. “Don’t be silly. We were only having a bit of fun weren’t we Bec?”

But I didn’t reply.
​
I lifted Birthday Bear from her lap and pulled him in close to me. Everything’s okay now, I whispered under my breath, stroking his head.

And then later that evening, as I fell asleep, I vowed never to him out of my sight again. Care Bears have real feelings you know.

Just like people.

~

~

~

~

~

​When she was little, she used the gazing ball like a funhouse mirror, watching her cheeks stretch as she danced around in circles, chanting incantations of made-up words. In college, it had only poked fun at her body dysmorphia, asking, Just how wide can we make those thighs?

Now, she wonders what it would feel like to take it off its plaster pedestal and kick it down the street, what sound it would make when it broke. She splays her fingers and follows the curvature with her fingertips. The glass is cold from the March air, almost wet to the touch.

What would they think if she cracked it like an egg? If she picked it up and hurled it against the window? The nieces and nephews she barely recognizes anymore, the aunts and uncles, all huddled around her mother like she’s some kind of grieving campfire—would it shock them out of pretending like they understand what was lost?

She wipes her fingers on her pantleg. Stepping back, she watches as the early rosebuds take on their new shape in the curved glass, how the red and yellow petals transform under the suggestion of purple tint. In a few months, the yard will be empty of rose bushes. Without her father to tend them, they will become the charge of the church, orphans replanted in a prayer garden.

Closing her eyes, she grips the gazing ball in both hands and holds it over her head. She breathes in the smell of lingering dew on year-old mulch and looks up to see her own funhouse face staring back at her. Then, she lets it drop and it shatters on the concrete. 

~

A boy, perhaps eight or nine, shifted under the weight of a sleeping baby on his back in a makeshift sling. Hands and face smudged with dust and dirt, he begged for money with vacant eyes and an outstretched hand, and he moved on when my friend said he had nothing to give.

“They do that to get sympathy, and more money,” my friend said as we walked further, “and if you give money to one, the rest see it and swarm you.”

My heart burst into a smile as I headed to the border town alone on a quiet, gray morning. “Maybe they’re not up this early,” I thought. I walked carefully to find anyone, everyone. In the distance, I saw him. Yes, he had the baby on his back. I rushed to him. He held out his hand, and I wondered if he recognized me from the day before. His monotonous motions told me no. He looked up at me with those same dusty eyes. I slung off my backpack and dove in for the goods. I handed him a package of raisin bread and beamed as I dug for milk.

He looked away then at me again. “No food. Money,” he said in English.

“No, I don’t have money, but you need to eat something. Here’s some milk for your sister.” I held the provisions out again.

“Money,” he said. Drained by the experience, he shuffled away, and some other brazen children plucked the snacks from my hand and ran off giggling. I stared at the boy and the baby until they drifted out of sight. 

The rain came down in sheets, the grey dampening a once crisp sky and dulling the buzz I had spent too much time and money cultivating. To say I was disappointed was to not understand how much I needed to stop the chaos or at least slow it down, how much I ached to escape your mother’s shame when she found us entwined and unabashed in the rooftop garden. It wasn’t the softness of my skin or the flatter bulge of my vulva that shocked her; she had always suspected your taste ran sapphic, it was my social standing and disregard for yours, or really hers as she saw what your neighbors most certainly did from their windows. You paused only a moment before running to soothe her seethe, while I stayed outside, slowly picking up lust-tossed clothes, folding yours, meticulously adjusting my shirt and pants and hair. I would not let her humiliate me, despite in many ways, having humiliated her. I see that now, and I know it is petty. Forgive me. I was not brought up in shame or guilt. I did not understand how you must have felt. I did not know that this, my inability to respond quickly, was would be what would break us apart. When you brought your sweets to the roof, offered me a plate of colored desserts, I had wanted just one bite of the yellow, unaware I should have savored them all.

I had seven dreams about my grandmother dying. Cancer was the first; hairless, wrinkled, reaching out a hand to my father, her only son. Next came the car accident. She was always a reckless driver, I remember holding onto the door handle as she sped through lights and hollered at jaywalkers. They just kept coming, night after night: house fire, hit by a bus, choked on her favorite steak dinner. Tripped at the grocery store. Went to bed after a Dateline special and simply never woke up.

I didn’t know who to tell. I didn’t know if I was even supposed to say anything. I was a kid who snuck downstairs after bed to watch CSI from behind the couch, I had bad dreams all the time. Nights where I showed up to school naked, or accidentally locked Remy, our German Shepherd, in the basement. Even a hauntingly specific one of being attacked by those talking rats from some Disney cartoon. These dreams didn’t feel too different at the time.

The morning after the last one, my dad got a call at the breakfast table. It was brief, he said a few words, then went and locked himself in his office on the third floor. Not even my mom was allowed in. The funeral was two weeks later, a rainy Sunday spent wondering why I alone had been warned about this.

I never had another dream like that. Never even had a single nightmare after that week, as luck would have it. If I dreamt at all it was fairly tame - visiting Disney World, lost in IKEA, an especially memorable one where I married my favorite Starbucks barista. Three decades of good dreams nearly put that week from my mind, erasing whatever precognitive abilities I’d dared to assume I had.

My sister called this past Friday morning. She usually phones on Sunday so we can straighten out dad’s care schedule for the week, figure out who’s going to take him to the hospital when. It’s usually all very straight forward. Kara doesn’t beat around the bush; too many kids to wrangle, too little of her youth left.

“You know,” she started, taking a slurping drink of coffee, drowning out the background noise of the kids playing. “Elsie told me she had a dream about you.”

The first thing out of the doctor’s mouth was “how is your summer going?” and I felt like slapping her but I stayed in my chair, recalling ultrasounds with heartbeats and ultrasounds without, hexagonal pills and searing pain and a bag labelled “biohazard,” and I remembered the mockery of the sun on my face as I carried the bag on the bus in my purse and delivered it to the hospital where a nurse removed the container from inside the bag, held it up to the light and chirped, “You got the right thing!” and took it away to be tested since this was number four and four wasn’t normal, especially when you’re 29, and she called me a month later to tell me it was a “genetically normal baby girl” and had no other words since the usual comforts didn’t apply, and it occurred to me that I had no other memories of the summer except for the cloud that became the world so that even in the mirror there was only fog, and then the doctor said, “We can’t find the cause and there’s nothing else we can do, except maybe IVF but I doubt it would work,” and she went to fetch some papers while the med student beside her whom I’d barely noticed before, squeezed her hands excitedly and took the opportunity to say, “I find this all so fascinating!” and I found it all so strange that as a light goes out in one person, it ignites in another, and it seemed I had contributed to the circle of life. ​