Watch The Bears [Schmidt]

[aa_coulson]

Some system has overloaded, nerve endings alight and fetters shaken free. Tension on a line, twinges on a wire pulled taut through the steady pressure of his pulse.

It is shrillest when has not slept, divinity alive in his bones and behind his eyes. A voice, a choir, a thrum that rolls with insect hoards seething through the fog around him and beats warm in the breasts of men, making them harder to hear.

A joke is made about his mother; he chuckles before he puts knuckle to jaw.

The arc has an echo, infinity shocked blindly ahead into pain.




The women here are not shy. They fuck in the mud like animals and Schmidt is reminded dimly of before, when that was the only kind of fucking he was likely to get. Rawboned, broken and bleeding, girls that he paid to remind him that he was a man.

He grins as he thinks of it, breaths ragged when he muscles her off and rolls up onto her to finish at

his own

pace

while she curses him.

Afterward she attempts to throw him out and he laughs at her, a knife blade stuck bright in his chest.




It is nearly Christmas in New York and raining when he sweeps a paper from its box, newsprint already dark with moisture. NO LEADS IN STARK SLAYINGS on page 4; he skims it before he dumps the roll into a bin. Around him last minute shoppers mill between lamps, spaced apart by their umbrellas.

Svalbard is quiet upon his return.

A bear licks his glove in the entry, searching thick after meat while he scuffs his ears. Schmidt tells him he is a good bear.

No one is here to complain that he lets them inside.