It’s my mother’s fault: she gave me
crayons, praised my precocious scrawls, enrolled me in those extra classes and paid for me
to cross the ocean. But could I blame her really, she who let me do what I
loved and was good at? I drew nice things, children love my drawings, and it
wasn’t my mother’s fault—it was the bear’s. But bears are beasts and so not morally culpable, a padre at a church
once told me, mistaking me for one of his flock.
I always kept the rights to my work, a point of pride for which I have been held liable. I loved bears. I was sad when I saw them at zoos, but I loved happy drawings of them, like in the Medvídek Pú books my father—him who I can’t blame, dead so long now—bought in the city on the way back from his trips abroad selling tractors. And of course no would say it, certainly not after the Halloween picture of the son as a tiny brontosaurus moved juror number seven to smear her light blue eye make-up as she stifled tears—but anyone can see it’s the parents’ fault. How could they not be watching a boy that age?
The beast was dead whatever the
state of its soul: a neighbor had a gun he used for killing deer. The boy—he
had wanted to share his breakfast—loved my books, my nice pictures of smiling
bears and their little friends with round cheeks like his. The people on the
jury were the sort that believe the world is just as long as someone is blamed, as though my pictures had to do with what bears eat. They rifled through my
life and found me blame-worthy. They had no right to watch those videos.
There are judgments, letters with
seals and demands and strange vocabulary. Lien is an English word new to me,
pronounced like standing crooked but meaning that I am poor.
Yesterday I went to the zoo and
looked at a polar bear loping back and forth miserably in the summer heat, its
fur stained and matted against its hollow ribs, and I said many times but under
my breath so no one would hear and think I was crazy—I’m happy you hate it here.