I am a photographer.

I am a father to Emily, a husband to Giselle. But my craft, my art, and my living come from looking through the glass and framing the perfect moment. As Emily and Giselle struggle to become comfortable in the formal clothes, I wait. I believe there is only one chance to take a photograph — the perfect moment the eyes reveal themselves.

We do not have long. Even with the doors of the studio closed, I can hear young soldiers in the street, tromping with oversized boots, and oversized caps, and guns that are just the right size. Like schoolboys, fighting in the yard. “Why can’t Papa be in the picture?” Emily demands. Giselle holds her close, avoiding my eyes. “Someone must take the photograph,” Giselle explains.

We never send women off to fight. I watch through the glass as Emily frowns. Women are too delicate, the men say. But they do not see women as I have — Giselle’s fierce eyes when she saw my orders; Emily’s innocent feral look when I caught her pulling wings from a dragonfly. In their eyes, the same bloodlust.

Giselle looks at me one last time, and the veils in her gaze fall away. We each fight in our own way, her eyes say, and I will fight to keep you until they drag you away. Then Emily kisses Giselle’s cheek, and Giselle looks away, into the distance, into the future.

Click.

Miss Blansky liked the way her house creaked and peeled, scaring the children the same way she had in her music lessons in school for twenty years.

She watched them from the bay window, wearing the same too-tight sweater, once baby blue and now an almost faded gray. The children dared each other to linger in front of the house as they passed, and Miss Blansky’s thin lips pursed together in a smile.

Her right hand felt something odd at her neck: a loose thread of yarn. She frowned; that wouldn’t do. Miss Blansky couldn’t knit, and she would never admit it. She tugged at the thread and some more came away. Unimaginable, she thought. Her mother had pressed on her the sweater the first day she taught music.

She tried to keep away from it, but her hands worried at it. And when the neck had unraveled, Miss Blansky breathed a little easier. She opened the back door, just a crack, to let the air in.

As the weather grew warmer, the stitches slipped away some more. The delivery man smiled at Miss Blansky for the first time, and looking down, she blushed. Then, in the privacy of her bedroom, she peeked in the mirror.

Her sleeves slowly unraveled and she felt air on her bare arms. She flung the back doors open, and eventually the front one too. When the astonished children looked at her, she smiled timidly. When the yarn gave way from her middle and her growling stomach was released, Miss Blansky made cookies, the scent of which drew the children and filled the house with laughter.

Marissa Blansky didn’t even notice when, one night, the last piece of yarn unraveled and sailed off in the midnight air, fluttering like a banner. Butterflies never look back.

She wheeled Charles across the small room to the window. “What’s your name?” he asked, eyeing her.

“I’m helping take care of you,” she said, brushing a strand of honey-blonde hair out of her eyes. Something familiar there, something in the eyes he tried to connect with — a memory chased down the dark tunnels of his heart.

“You remind me of my wife,” Charles said abruptly, looking out at the garden. Frozen over, with a solitary squirrel without a cache of nuts for the winter. “Claire, that was her name.” She stirred behind him.

The hair had been brown once, he could picture it. Now this woman dyed it. “I met her right after the war ended. In a bar. Or maybe a party, I don’t know. It blurs together.”

She gently turned the wheelchair around. “Did you love her?” she asked him, pallid blue eyes searching his.

“Oh yes,” he said. “Right up until the very end.”

The woman sighed. “What happened to her?”

He saw it in her eyes. She’d been here before. She always wanted the same thing, the thing he couldn’t give her: the memory.

The moment passed. Charles glanced back at the window, but the squirrel was gone. “I think you’d better go,” he said, not unkindly.

The woman frowned. “Are you mad at me?”

“No, not at all.”

“I, I don’t understand, I thought you were–”

An orderly appeared at her side, straightening the woman’s bathrobe. “That’s all right,” the orderly soothed. “It’s time to go back to your room.”

Charles sighed and wheeled himself around. “Any luck today?” the orderly asked.

“There’s always hope,” he answered, voice raspy, feeling his age.

“Come on, Claire,” the orderly said. One hand around the elderly woman’s shoulders, he led her down the hall.

Live fast, die young, leave a beautiful corpse. Well, Ellen thought, looking at herself in the mirror, she would definitely do the third. The funeral parlor wouldn’t have to apply any of that horrible cover-up Halloween makeup if she killed herself the right way.

Ellen sat at her fashionable desk and pondered the list she’d made of methods. She abhorred the term ‘suicide’; it sounded so much like insecticide.

Slitting her wrists was out. Ellen knew from television that she’d have to cut perpendicular to her wrists, not parallel. No chance of an even, attractive scar. Too much blood for a wake using her nice furniture. And what kind of pallor would her face have with all that blood drained?

With hanging, there was the bruising and tongue elongation. With jumping, she could bang her head on some rocks, and then there would be no open casket. How would her friends Sue and Jasmine be able to see her final smile if half of her head was caved in — or worse,reconstructed? Shooting herself brought up similar problems, and Ellen had always been in favor of gun control.

The doorbell rang. Really, there had only been one solution. Unfortunately, her doctor was too sensible to prescribe her large quantities of medication, but there were always ways around that.

The young man was as pleasant in person as he had been on the telephone. “Do you have them?” Ellen asked.

He advanced on her and gently cupped her chin in his hands. “I’m sorry,” Ellen said, “I’m interested in death, not love.”

His hands tightened. “It’s so much easier when they want to die,” he breathed. “I don’t feel guilty at all.”

Oh dear, Ellen thought dimly. No amount of makeup was going to make these bruises go away.

Max pushed the book away from the woman. “You don’t want to buy that.”

“That’s exactly what I came in here to buy,” she said. “James Joyce.”

“He’ll just break your heart,” Max said. “All wordplay and no action.” The woman was tucked into winter furs, determination set into her face. Max was familiar with the type; he saw enough of them in the used bookstore. The literary equivalent of the Christian who went to church on Christmas and Easter, she belonged to a book club.

“You do have the best prices around here,” the woman said. “I don’t like to patronize the big-box chains.”

She didn’t patronize anyone but the small stores, indeed. “Book club?” he asked slyly.

She flushed. “Personal interest.”

Max nodded. “Of course, of course.” Don’t get too close, he thought. “Are you sure you didn’t mean James Cavell?”

“I know the difference between Ulysses and Shogun,” she said huffily. The people behind her shuffled impatiently. “For a place that’s so popular, it’s surprising how unfriendly you are.”

Max sighed, pretending defeat. “Now, we only accept cash,” he said, calculating. “Exact change. That’ll be…three dollars and eighty-nine cents.”

“Exact change?” she nodded, getting the picture. The woman looked around. One of the dead foxes on her neck swung around, as if in agreement. “Oh, I see. This isn’t a business at all.”

She huffed out. Victory, Max thought. But there was the rest of the line to dissuade.

At the end of the day, Ronnie called, like every day. “Did you sell any books today, dear?” Ronnie asked.

Max glanced at the unbought stack on the counter. “Nothing today. Crowds are thinning out.” Fortunately.

“Don’t get discouraged, honey. I’ve got the cash to see you through any slump. Remember, it’s a labor of love.”

Alicia sighed as she bent down and smelled the camellias. Raymond had remembered their anniversary. Of course; in 27 years he’d never forgotten.

She smiled as she walked into the kitchen. How many women could be this lucky? Handwritten love notes tucked into her jacket pockets. Romantic lunches on the spur of the moment. And the flowers. From carnations to orchids, he knew just how to brighten her mood.

“Who got you flowers, dear?” Raymond asked. He was frowning. Alicia couldn’t remember him looking this…panicked?

Her anniversary. Their anniversary? “The office, dear,” Alicia said clumsily. “I’ll take them into the bedroom.”

The bedroom door closed behind her, her fingers fumbled for the card. Raymond’s masculine writing, “To my darling Alicia.” She telephoned the florist.

“Standing order?” she said, drumming her fingers on the dresser. “But you couldn’t reach him today? I see. Thank you.” Alicia hung up the phone and looked at the closet.

The notes. The notes Raymond slipped into her clothes…She picked up the telephone and called the dry cleaner. “Personal valet service? I see. Thank you.”

Alicia locked the bedroom door and paced back and forth. In her mind she saw a giant calendar, with markings labeled Alicia, dates turned over and over by some monstrous machine.

Raymond tried the door, then knocked. Alicia looked at their wedding photograph. So much promise.I love you, she thought. Said so many times that the record slips into the groove.

Flowers, notes, cards. Until Alicia had come to expect it. Until her response was as automatic as his trigger.

Alicia picked up the telephone and dialed. “Paging service? Yes, I’d like to have a reminder set up.”

She looked at the door, dry-eyed. “Standing order.”

When She Was

When she was a little girl, her daddy hit her every time she cried. So Alice learned not to cry, not when her porcelain doll, Mrs. Smith, broke an arm; not when mommy left on a trip and didn’t come back; and not even when daddy hit her for no reason at all, smelling all sour and bad like the bottom of the garbage.

When she could get away, Alice would take Mrs. Smith with her broken arm to the park and hide under her favorite willow tree. She scolded Mrs. Smith for having a broken arm. “Bad Mrs. Smith! Look what you did! Making daddy angry with you!” And she hit Mrs. Smith over and over again, and somehow Mrs. Smith ended up with two broken arms. But Alice didn’t tell daddy, because he’d only be twice as angry.

When she was a teenager, Alice returned her father’s beer bottles for the deposits to buy food. She ignored the taunts of her fellow schoolmates when they saw her in the supermarket uniform after school, brittle mask on her face.

When she was a young woman, Alice dated a string of men who saw her looks as a challenge and veneer. They’re all alike, she thought, crumpling telephone numbers from men who’d never call again, men who promised they’d change, men who promised they were different. None were.

When she was thirty, Alice’s belly gently swelled, and she cursed the man who’d tricked her. What kind of mother would she be? She didn’t love herself; how could she love a child?

When Alice’s daughter knocked over a vase, Alice clasped her own hands until she thought they would break. Then she took her daughter to the park. There, under the willow, they tried to glue the pieces back together.

“Like the best books that would seem to have an audience in mind, this book could appeal to a wider range of people interested in humorous but pointed satire, which I tested by leaving the book out in a pile of leaves in the middle of the woods.  Soon, several women and straight men ventured along, flipped through it, and guffawed, so I know it could have a broader appeal.”

Take a look at http://datimster.blogspot.com/2011/06/bear-like-me-by-jonathan-cohen-in.html.

Thanks, Tim!

“The book sparkles with Cohen’s wit and humor and yes I realize that sparkle and delightful are not words that bears would use. The beauty of this book is that it is a fun read for everyone, not just bears and I certainly see where this is a novel with crossover appeal. I could not stop reading it once I began and I am so glad to see that Lethe has rereleased it for all those who might have missed it the first time around.”

Thanks, Amos!

“This exuberant and sweet satire is a word juggling comedic circus; involving total immersion in the gay sub-culture of all-singing, all-dancing bears.”

Take a look at http://www.reviewsbyjessewave.com/2011/06/17/bear-like-me/.

Thanks, Raine and other commenters on that post!