Before meeting Dog Joe, Megan always slept sound and peacefully. The encounter showed a magnificent world to the young woman. It freed her. Spoke secrets to her. Explained life and death and everything in between. But she couldn't explain it to a soul. She went to work and back home, with a hunger. Her stomach didn't ache for a meal or snack; it quivered with the feeling one feels at the end of summer camp. Since meeting Dog Joe, Meagan didn't sleep -- she dreamed a carnival of visions and possibilities ignited by images and ideas. Stories of animals and ages past unraveled a history of the earth like never before seen. But she kept her dreams and stories to herself.
"Who would believe me," she asked the ceiling of her apartment. "Who would believe me?" Then she closed her eyes.
One evening, Meagan drifted to sleep with late night reruns going.The televisions played all on the walls of her room. The lights and sounds bounced around and on the matching white furniture, and it flashed at her face. Deep in her mind, in a realistically detailed realm, she walked about the streets of Calgary. The ferry's light way down a boulevard shimmered small and quiet. The rows of brownstones were draped in the sky's shadows. Cold wind spun around the little Canadian street-side, through banisters, and off windows, blessing the sparse trees with their signature sway.
The woman crept forward on the familiar sidewalk -- though she couldn't recognize anything for sure -- and pointed out her favorite yogurt shoppe, the local grocery store, and further down, the lot where a fruit market sets up on Sundays. When she came beside a closed boutique, she put her hand to the glass. It was the first dream since meeting the little boy that was completely devoid of creatures and nature and truth. Weirdly, it was "only reality," she thought before noticing her hand was a paw.
Meagan wore a bear's thick furry paw. She tried to shake the paw off, but it wouldn't budge. She scratched at it with her other hand but noticed it too was a paw. She began to romp about wildly, eventually going to all fours, instinctively. She wondered how it was possible that she hadn't noticed that she was actually a bear, a grown, female, gnawing, clawing Canadian Grizzly.
In the window, she could see her mouth and nose replaced with a snout and big grizzly teeth. She smiled a big grizzly smile at herself, opened her jaws and chomped down hard. She turned with her back to the window and asked her reflection, "Does my butt look big?"
Meagan was humored to see herself covered in fur, as long as none of her friends ran into her. She felt free to run about the streets and alleyways. If a car passed by, she quickly scurried into the shadow of an alley.
A big, loud truck hummed its way down Mainstreet. Meagan romped over into a alleyway and crouched down into the dark, next to a garbage canister. With big eyes looking out, she watched the truck pass with the words "NOITULLOP INDUSTRIES" in bright yellow letters on the side. Once it reached out of ear-shot, Meagan crept out of her cover. A noise behind her startled the large creature, and she lurched her neck around to find an old homeless man cowering in the corner adjacent to her. She hadn't seen the man, and they stood silently for a moment.
"Guaaaapooooooll!" the old man yelled before rising and shaking his hand in the air. "Eyyyyy!"
"What--" Meagan quickly turned to run as the old man dashed toward her. She leaped out into the street and turned, galloping on all fours down the road as fast as she could. She could hear the hooting, gray-haired, homeless man scuttling behind her. She picked up speed and broke into a stride with her face flapping in the wind.
Far down, under a sanguine moon, she stopped and rested. Laying on her back, heaving air through big bear lungs, Meagan tried to relax while listening out for the old man. While looking up at a speckled night sky, she watched a snowflake drift drunkenly down from the sky to her face. It landed on her snout, and she licked it off with a long, wide tongue. Then another white flake fell. Then another. And another. Very soon, blankets upon blankets of snow sundered down on roofs and ground.
The bear stood up and shook her body. To no end, the snow fell faster and heavier, covering her paws, then up to her chin -- eventually, she had to tunnel her way out of through the street. She pushed blind through the deep, white sea. She finally broke through to a clear under a large awning which held up snow.
Fear consumed her as the snow cap grew higher and higher. She spun around considering where to go and what to do when the thought hit her -- Wake up.
"Meagan, wake up. You're not a bear. It's not snowing. Wake up!" she moaned in bear language. She squeezed her eyes hard and could feel her legs stretching out on her sheets on her bed in her room.
"Wake up!"
And just before she was able to wake, a feeling filled her belly, a pressure under her ribs made her look up. Through the snow, she could see a yellow light flashing ravingly with a siren blaring. Then the ground shook. The snow itself shuttered. And a salad of new noises drowned out the siren's ring. A stampede of thumps, the crack of cry's that bled from the sky, honks and roars all met and came onto the town in a wave.
The powerful resonance left Meagan breathless as she shot up sweating in her bed with late-night reruns coruscating light on her human face.
